Helena Rosenblatt and Daniel Klein debate the origins of liberalism. Rosenblatt believes that Klein misuses Adam Smith. However, there is no way to know how Adam Smith would have acted in today’s political climate.

What is liberalism? What is the political meaning of liberalism? How old is the idea of liberty? Was Edmund Burke thought of himself as a conservative? Is it a mistake to think that libertarians are part of the liberal tradition? At what point for example, does John Locke become called a liberal?

Further Reading:

The Lost History of Liberalism, written by Helena Rosenblatt

Liberty Between the Lines in a Statist and Modernist Age, written by Daniel Klein

The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith

Related Content:

Was Adam Smith a Libertarian?, written by Paul Mueller

Self-Interest and Social Order in Classical Liberalism: Thomas Hobbes, written by George H. Smith

The Levelers: Libertarian Revolutionaries, written by Nicholas Elliott

It is often assumed that libertarianism depends on thinking that property rights are absolute, or on fetishizing individual liberty. But, Dan Moller argues that the foundations of libertarianism lie in widely shared, everyday moral beliefs, especially regarding restrictions on shifting our burdens onto others.

What does it mean to shift burdens? Where do rights come from? Why do some people find redistribution of wealth appealing? Why is utilitarianism self-deception? How utopian should you be in your political philosophy?

Further Reading:

Governing Least: A New England Libertarianism, written by Dan Moller

Locke and Nozick on the Justification of Property, written by Matt Zwolinski

Related Content:

A Libertarian Model of the Social Safety Net, written by David S. D’Amato

Government Money and Bureaucratic Control, written by Grant Babcock

A Libertarian Perspective on the Modern American Welfare State, written by Michael D. Tanner

How did Limbaugh change the radio business? How did the conservative opinion media come to be? Who were the left-wing talk radio hosts while Rush Limbaugh was gaining more and more listeners? Is NPR political advocacy media? What is media bias? Who is Howard Stern and what is “guy talk”? Why are liberal podcasts succeeding in the Trump era?

Conservative talk radio has become an assumed presence in American media and politics, but in this manifestation it is only about three decades old. Historian Brian Rosenwald joins the show to discuss his latest book, Talk Radio’s America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party that Took Over the United States, which explores the rise of entertainers like Rush Limbaugh from the margins to having incredible influence in national politics. That surprising story has implications for other media, including the future of podcasting, which is allowing previously marginalized voices, from socialists to libertarians, to have greater voice, for good or for ill. 

Further Reading:

Talk Radio’s America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States, written by Brian Rosenwald

Rush Limbaugh’s Problem: How The Internet Changed Talk Radio, written by Brian Rosenwald

Why All The Talk-Radio Stars Are Conservative, written by Abram Brown

Related Content:

Talking Across Political Divides (with Arnold Kling), Free Thoughts Podcast

Is Netflix Ruining Culture?, written by Pamela J. Hobart

The Fairness Doctrine Was Terrible for Broadcasting and It Would Be Terrible for the Internet, written by Paul Matzko

There are not many issues that economists are nearly unanimous about, but one of them is the analysis of price controls. The basic economics of price ceilings and price floors are part of every introductory textbook and are normally presented without indicating that there is much internal criticism of the analytical framework by other economists. Price ceilings and price floors are government policies that turn out to produce exactly the opposite of what they intend, and thereby create problems that are often responded to with even more poor policies. What starts as a seemingly simple and well-intentioned attempt to help consumers or particular producers can quickly become a disaster.

In this essay I will walk through that basic economic analysis and then turn to talk about the way price controls, specifically price ceilings, are applied in emergency situations through laws against so-called “price gouging.” Those particular situations spotlight some of the aspects of price ceilings that aren’t always emphasized in the textbook treatment and thereby enable us to get a greater appreciation of how market processes work when we do not try to put such controls on prices.

A Quick Overview of Price Controls

In the typical textbook treatment, one chapter walks students through the way in which markets tend toward the market-clearing (or equilibrium) price and quantity. At that price, the quantity demanded equals the quantity supplied and, given the price, no one walks away frustrated or disappointed. The plans of demanders are coordinated with those of suppliers. In that chapter, we normally motivate this by supposing that the price of a good is temporarily above or below that market-clearing price. We then walk through the ways this creates a knowledge signal and incentive for buyers and sellers to respond in such ways as to move that price toward market-clearing. On the assumption that all else remains constant, economic theory shows why the price will reach that market-clearing point.

We motivate this by pointing out that prices below or above market-clearing will cause shortages and surpluses, respectively. So if the price is below market-clearing, the quantity demanded (QD) of the product will be relatively high as the lower price attracts more buyers. The quantity supplied (QS) will be relatively low, as suppliers will be unwilling to part with their stock of the good at that low price. The result will be a shortage, which we define as QD > QS. How does this resolve itself? Some demanders who really want the good will be frustrated in not being able to get it at the current low price and will be willing to pay something more than that price for the good. As they offer more for it, some suppliers will now be willing to offer more for sale at that higher price. Other demanders will now make higher offers and this process will continue until the market-clearing price is reached. Note the competition here: demanders are competing with other demanders so that they can better cooperate with suppliers.

The process for prices temporarily above market-clearing is a mirror image. This time the QS of the good will be relatively high, as suppliers are willing to offer a large supply at the high price. The QD, by contrast, will be relatively low as the high price causes some potential demanders to walk away. When QS > QD we have a surplus, and suppliers find themselves with stocks of unsold goods. They soon realize that they can get rid of some of them by offering them at a somewhat lower price. As they do, some demanders are now willing to purchase, even as some suppliers back out of the market being unwilling to sell for the lower price. As QD rises and QS falls, we work our way back down to market clearing. Notice here that the competition is among suppliers: they are competing with each other to find demanders they can cooperate with. In both the shortage and surplus case, it is the entrepreneurial insight of the “long side” of the market (i.e.: the demanders who can’t find suppliers in a shortage, and then the suppliers who can’t find demanders in a surplus) that drives us toward the market clearing by changing their behavior in response to the market signal and the incentives it creates.

For markets to work as they should, market participants require the freedom to exercise the entrepreneurship involved in changing bids and asks. If demanders can’t offer a higher price or suppliers can’t offer a lower price, this process is short-circuited and we get permanent shortages and surpluses and the problems they cause. This is what happens when politicians pass laws that mandate a maximum price, what we call a “price ceiling,” or a minimum price, what we call a “price floor.” In the typical textbook presentation, an analysis of these price controls comes in the chapter after the one on market adjustment and market clearing.

If governments pass price ceilings that mandate the highest price a good or service can sell for, we will get those shortages. Think about rent control, perhaps one of the best examples of a price ceiling. If we force the rental price of apartments below market-clearing, a larger number of people will want to rent at that price, but a smaller number of owners of (potential) apartments will put them on the market. The result will be a shortage of apartments. But this time, because the disequilibrium price is legal maximum, there’s no way for potential renters to legally bid up the price to signal the higher value they place on renting and thereby encourage an increase in the QS. The result is that the shortage will persist as long as the price ceiling is below the market clearing rent.

Shortages create a number of problems. The main one is finding some way of allocating the limited supply among the much larger number of demanders. In general, shortages lead to queues, whether in the form of physical lines at a store, as in the former Soviet Union, or things like waitlists for apartments. The large pool of demanders gives the suppliers the power in this situation, as they can pick and choose among the demanders without worrying they are giving up a sale. This allows suppliers to discriminate by whatever criteria they think are important (and presumably legal). Suppliers will also find ways around the rent maximum by tacking all other kinds of charges on to the rental agreement such as key charges or rental charges for a mailbox. The limits on rents also discourage landlords from doing maintenance, either short run or long run. They can afford to not fix current problems quickly because there’s always someone else to rent to if the current tenant is unhappy. One result of this is the increase in complex bureaucratic rules about settling complaints, either privately or publicly. This is a consequence of rent control. The artificially low rent also means that owners are unlikely to update in more major ways, or bring other buildings onto the rental market, as they cannot recoup the costs at the legally permitted rent. Rent control and similar laws are one element of why there are housing shortages in so many US cities.

With laws that mandate a minimum price, what we call “price floors,” all of this analysis applies in reverse. Suppliers are prevented from lowering their price to draw in potential demanders for their good or service, which prevents prices from moving to market-clearing levels and makes the resulting surpluses permanent. One of the best examples of a price floor is minimum wage laws. The suppliers in this case are workers who are selling their labor to employers who demand it. At a minimum wage above market-clearing, people who are willing to work at a wage below the minimum are legally prevented from making an offer to do so, which means they cannot compete the wage down to market-clearing as they would without a law. With a large number of people wanting to work and employers only being willing to hire relatively few at the higher minimum wage, we get a surplus of labor, better known as unemployment. The law denies the potential workers the ability to send the signal that they are willing to work for less and thereby create the incentive for firms to hire them. The unemployment that results becomes persistent.

Much like price ceilings, price floors like minimum wage laws cause a number of problems. In parallel fashion to rent control, the party on the “short side” of the market has the power here. Firms can choose from among a very large pool of potential workers and know that if they don’t wish to hire someone for whatever reason, there’s always someone else who’ll take the job. Minimum wage laws create an incentive for employers to discriminate along any number of (legal) margins. Firms also respond to the higher wage by reducing other forms of compensation for those who do get the work. This might include reducing hours, but can also include eliminating free meals or free uniforms, increasing the workload expectation, or having supervisors become more micro-managing. All of these adjustments are not negotiated and likely make employees worse off. Most important, wages are linked to productivity, so a minimum wage law is also a minimum productivity law. The result is that minimum wage laws cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder to lower skilled workers, who are far more statistically likely to be young and non-white. Changes in minimum wage levels are closely correlated with changes in the black/white youth unemployment ratio. It is often the most vulnerable, those who advocates of such laws claim to wish to help, who are harmed the most. The inability to signal through the price system creates any number of problems, whether in the form of price ceilings or price floors.

Emergencies Don’t Change the Analysis

Unfortunately, even among non-economists who would agree with the analysis of price ceilings above, many of these lessons are disregarded when it comes to suppliers raising prices in emergency situations like natural disasters. Unlike something like rent control, which tries to force the price down below the current market-clearing level, laws against so-called “price gouging” (a term that has no objective definition in economics) outlaw or dramatically limit price increases from the current market-clearing levels. They are a response to the combination of sharply increased demand and possibly reduced supply pushing prices up significantly for items like gas, ice, water, and flashlights. Anti-gouging laws are extremely popular, and probably reflect our deep-seated moral instincts that find such behavior repugnant, rather than any attempt at economic analysis. Be that as it may, it does not change the validity of the economics.

Anti-gouging laws cause all of the same problems that every other price ceiling does: shortages, queues, excessive search costs, power in the hands of sellers, and numerous other forms of inefficient non-price allocation, including favoring relatives and accepting bribes. Even as people might recognize this, they still frequently believe it is “unfair” to “take advantage” of people’s “need” for goods and services during an emergency. It’s interesting, however, that anti-gouging laws are never applied to the suppliers of labor services. Carpenters, plumbers, and electricians often see their wages double or triple in the aftermath of a natural disaster, but I have never seen anyone accuse them of “wage gouging” nor any of them prosecuted for it. The moral outrage seems interestingly selective here.

Whatever the role of the felt repugnance, selective though it may be, from the economist’s perspective, the issue looks a little different. What is the case for allowing prices to rise dramatically when goods are scarce during an emergency? In general terms, we want prices to serve as a signal and incentive in all the ways we’ve discussed before. The much higher prices for goods during an emergency reflect the reality of their increased scarcity caused by the emergency, and that is important information and provides an important incentive. Another way to think about this is that we have a problem to solve: how do we increase the supply of the now much scarcer resources and thereby bring the price back down so we can get those resources in more people’s hands?  Counter-intuitively, allowing prices to rise without limit in the throes of the crisis is the way to do so. There are two effects in play.

In the immediate run, allowing prices to rise this way forces potential buyers of the goods to make very careful decisions about how they will use those goods. If bottled water is extremely expensive, people are unlikely to use it to, for example, give their dogs a bath. High-priced ice is far more likely to be purchased by those who need to keep medicine cold than those who want to keep beer cold. High prices help to ensure that the very limited supply of the good get used in its most valuable way. Those who have a very urgent need for the good will be more likely to be willing to pay the high price. And that’s the way it should be. When water is in short supply, giving the dog a bath seems a less valuable use of it than does human consumption. Letting prices rise enables us to husband scarce resources in economically efficient and socially valuable ways.

But it’s the second effect that’s perhaps the more important and more overlooked one. The much higher price for the goods in short supply serves as a signal flare providing both knowledge and incentives for people to bring in new supplies of the good. Seeing that water is selling for $30 a case after a hurricane in Florida both informs and incentivizes people across the Southeast US and beyond to buy up water near them and undertake the expense of bringing it to the affected area, and then selling it for something less than $30 a case. They profit from this activity, but they also shift the supply curve to the right, increasing the supply of water and bringing its price down in the process. This is entrepreneurship pure and simple, with benefits to all parties. Others will see the profits being made and imitate the first few who truck in water. Their entry into the market will further increase supply and drive down price. Notice that we have begun to solve the fundamental problem:  how do we get an increased supply into the affected area at a lower price? The answer is to let prices rise as much as needed in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane.

None of this analysis is anything different than the standard approach to price ceilings. But something about emergencies and very high prices seems to activate a disgust with charging higher prices that overrides our ability to think through the effects, This reaction is also connected to the belief that it’s better to help people through charity and altruism than self-interest. In general, humans tend to be suspicious when self-interest is activated, and it’s often hard for us to see how self-interested behavior can lead to socially beneficial unintended consequences. This reaction is a moral instinct most likely developed in our long evolutionary past, most of which was spent in small, kin-based groups. In that context, self-interested behavior threatened the survival of the group, and anyone who behaved that way would be seen as taking advantage of other group members. This moral instinct is frequently in play in market interactions in general, as we see in the moral disdain for profit-making. Emergencies will activate this reaction even more strongly, as it seems more obvious that the profit-seekers must be taking advantage of others by charging higher prices. What economics can help us understand, contrary to our untrained moral intuitions, is that, under the right institutions, self-interested behavior can lead to socially beneficial consequences, even in emergencies.

One of the problems is that people seem to think that the choice is between low prices and sufficiently abundant supplies versus high prices and abundant supplies. In fact, that’s not the choice. At low prices, supplies will be very low, while at higher prices supplies will, at least in short order, be far greater. If the problem is making sure that there are greater supplies of the good, you are not going to get that by legally mandating a low price. The “fault” here lies not with sellers charging high prices, but with the destruction caused by the natural disaster or other emergency that has led to a reduction in supply and an increase in demand. What sellers are doing is trying to solve the problem the crisis has created. The path to greater supplies at lower prices is to allow prices to rise initially to send the signal to bring forth new supplies.

Emergencies do not change the laws of economics, even if the way they play out offends our moral sensibilities. If the problem during an emergency is that goods have become more scarce and more expensive, the solution is not to try to force the price down, but rather to let it rise to signal the scarcity and provide the knowledge and incentives to entrepreneurs who can bring in new supplies and drive the price back down. No one likes paying higher prices in an emergency, but there is no option of paying a lower price and having supplies magically appear. The higher price in the immediate aftermath is a necessary step to responding in socially beneficial ways to the effects of the crisis. If we want to avoid the problems caused by price ceilings, we need to find a way to get beyond our instinctive repugnance and think about what sorts of policies will actually solve the problem we want to solve. Letting market prices do their job is the right choice.

Timothy Sandefur comes back to the show to talk about John Bronowksi. Bronowski had a wide array of interests. He invented smokeless coal and was a friend to Leo Szilard, the inventor of the atomic bomb. In fact, he led the mission to assess the aftermath of the atomic bomb in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was not much this famous scientist, philosopher, and poet didn’t do and Sandefur was the first author to write a biography of him.

Who was John Bronowski? Why was Bronowski a socialist? Should politics stay out of science? What scientific research was conducted by the Nazis?

Further Reading:

The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski: The Life and Ideas of a Popular Science Icon, written by Timothy Sandefur

Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man, written by Timothy Sandefur

The Ascent of Man, BBC Documentary

The Disestablishment of Science: I, written by John Bronowski

Related Content: 

Science Doesn’t Need Public Funding, Free Thoughts Podcast

Bias in Scientific Research, Free Thoughts Podcast

What Role Should Science Play in Public Policy?, Free Thoughts Podcast

“A dog has the right to be a dog,” reads the Užupis Constitution, which I saw engraved on a shiny plaque in Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania. The Republic of Užupis is a small self-declared country. Užupis, which roughly translates into English as “behind the river,” is a bohemian, artistic, and free-spirited republic. 

Užupis declared itself independent from Lithuania on April 1st, 1997; however, this is no April Fool’s joke. The tiny republic, which covers less than one square kilometer, has a president, foreign affairs minister, passport stamps, currency, and of course a constitution.  

The constitution was written in July 1998 by Thomas Chepaitis, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Uzupis and Romas Lileikis, the President of Užupis. It is translated into languages as diverse as Nepalese, Armenian, and Farsi, with more than 30 translations hanging on the wall and new languages being added all the time, including Dutch, Urdu, and Portuguese. 

To truly understand the quirky nature of Užupis, here is the constitution in full: 

1. Everyone has the right to live by the River Vilnele, and the River Vilnele has the right to flow by everyone.

2. Everyone has the right to hot water, heating in winter and a tiled roof.

3. Everyone has the right to die, but this is not an obligation.

4. Everyone has the right to make mistakes.

5. Everyone has the right to be unique.

6. Everyone has the right to love.

7. Everyone has the right not to be loved, but not necessarily.

8. Everyone has the right to be undistinguished and unknown.

9. Everyone has the right to idle.

10. Everyone has the right to love and take care of the cat.

11. Everyone has the right to look after the dog until one of them dies.

12. A dog has the right to be a dog.

13. A cat is not obliged to love its owner, but must help in time of need.

14. Sometimes everyone has the right to be unaware of their duties.

15. Everyone has the right to be in doubt, but this is not an obligation.

16. Everyone has the right to be happy.

17. Everyone has the right to be unhappy.

18. Everyone has the right to be silent.

19. Everyone has the right to have faith.

20. No one has the right to violence.

21. Everyone has the right to appreciate their unimportance.

22. No one has the right to have a design on eternity.

23. Everyone has the right to understand.

24. Everyone has the right to understand nothing.

25. Everyone has the right to be of any nationality.

26. Everyone has the right to celebrate or not celebrate their birthday.

27. Everyone shall remember their name.

28. Everyone may share what they possess.

29. No one can share what they do not possess.

30. Everyone has the right to have brothers, sisters and parents.

31. Everyone may be independent.

32. Everyone is responsible for their freedom.

33. Everyone has the right to cry.

34. Everyone has the right to be misunderstood.

35. No one has the right to make another person guilty.

36. Everyone has the right to be individual.

37. Everyone has the right to have no rights.

38. Everyone has the right to not to be afraid.

39. Do not defeat.

40. Do not fight back.

41. Do not surrender.

The parliament is housed in a local bar, by one of the entrances to Užupis. People are encouraged to get involved in the Užupis government by, for example, becoming an ambassador to any number of nations, real or imagined, from the Embassy to Iceland to the Embassy of Hugs and the Embassy among Hummingbirds. 

“I take all this seriously, but with humor, of course, because humor is a vital fluid of life. In some sense Ministry is my biggest happening or event, in which over 500 people are taking part now,” said Thomas Chepaitis, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, in regards to the embassies.

Despite the light-hearted aspects of this republic, Užupis truly emulates the overarching ideas of liberalism regarding freedom and independence, accompanied by a generally anti-statist attitude.

The idea for Užupis emerged following the breakdown of the Soviet Union. When Lithuania declared itself independent from the Soviet Union in 1990, andpeople started taking down all the statues of Lenin, Saulius Paukstys had the idea to erect a statue of Frank Zappa. 

“We were desperate to find a symbol that would mark the end of communism, but at the same time express that it wasn’t always doom and gloom,” Paukstys told The Guardian in 2000. “Okay, so Zappa never visited Lithuania and had no connection with the country, but as far as I was concerned, this was a test of our new-found freedom,” added Paukstys. “Lithuania had just proclaimed itself to be a democratic country. I wanted to test it and see if I would be able to realize my ideas.”

In a time of rampant post-Soviet corruption and cronyism, Užupis’ flag sports a blue hand with a whole in it, alluding to the fact that their officials will not accept bribes. “The main thing is we have nothing to hide in our hands,” said Kestas Lukoskinas. If you do not like the particular mores of Užupis, you have the complete right to exit. While you can get your visa stamped, people have the freedom to come and go from Užupis without any government say so, though I suspect that this charming community will see much more of the former than the latter.

James Monroe is an important, yet often underappreciated, political figure in the early American republic. In some ways this result is because he was the last of the Virginia Dynasty, following George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison into the presidency. Monroe was not a deep thinker, as were Jefferson and Madison, nor was he the charismatic leader that Washington was. Monroe, instead, was a smart, capable leader who preferred to remain off center stage and operate in the shadows. In some ways his leadership style was a precursor to the “hidden-hand presidency” of Dwight Eisenhower. Monroe was president during a remarkable time known today as the “Era of Good Feelings.” This era witnessed the westward expansion of the young republic, the first peacetime economic depression, a series of major Supreme Court decisions, a nasty fight over the issue of slavery, important developments in the field of foreign affairs and national security policy, and efforts to promote economic development. Monroe made many important decisions, many of which were correct, but he made his share of bad decisions and had his share of missed opportunities for better results.^[1]

Monroe took office in a nation that still bore the scars of the recent War of 1812. His inauguration occurred in a hastily constructed addition to the Capitol, because the British had burned the structure in 1814. Likewise, Monroe was unable to move into the Executive Mansion until September 1817 because of the damage caused by the fire set by the British in the same raid that burned the Capitol.^[2] Monroe’s inaugural address was short on specifics, though he complimented the American people on the decline of factionalism and the national success in the recent war, while also recognizing the need for improved transportation and communications networks. Monroe did not provide his audience with any specific means to achieve the latter goal.^[3]

Shortly after taking office, Monroe left the capital on a tour of the northern and eastern states, something not done by a president since George Washington, in order to examine coastal defenses. He likewise toured southern states in early 1819. Those trips proved to be two of the early high points of Monroe’s presidency. Everywhere he passed through Monroe received a hearty welcome, especially as he moved into New England in 1817. Monroe’s presence served as a unifying force for a nation that had experienced significant opposition to the recent war in this region, most notably in the form of the Hartford Convention of 1814. He was a reminder of the Revolutionary War, during which he had served as an officer in the Continental Army and had been seriously wounded at the Battle of Trenton, and he was also seen by residents of New England as a force for reconciliation. Indeed, it was the Boston Columbian Centinel that first used the phrase “Era of Good Feelings” as a title of an article about Monroe’s visit to that city. There had been hope among some New England Federalists that Monroe would welcome them back into political respectability by offering them positions within the national government, but this proved illusory. Monroe did not wish to alienate his Republican supporters by appointing Federalists, and as he was quite aware, the Federalists lacked a viable alternative to supporting his administration, continuing their postwar decline. This decision by Monroe, while gratifying those who wished to see the end of political party conflict, created something much worse, namely politics that began to center around sectional divisions between North and South.^[4] There was also a self-serving element to Monroe’s trips. After praising Charles C. and Thomas Pinckney in Charleston, South Carolina in 1819, Monroe urged his son-in-law, George Hay, to write a paragraph about the episode to reduce party feeling. Another episode occurred in Charleston, when Monroe made sure to mention Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase at a gathering. As Noble Cunningham notes, “Monroe missed few opportunities to bolster his political position.”^[5]

Early in his presidency, Monroe achieved two important foreign policy goals, the demilitarization of the Great Lakes and a temporary solution to the Oregon issue. The Great Lakes area had witnessed several battles on land and sea during the recent war; therefore, achieving the demilitarization of the Great Lakes was of high importance. Negotiations began in 1816, while Monroe was still Secretary of State but concluded during the first months of his presidency, and the Senate approved the Rush-Bagot Agreement in April 1818. This agreement limited Great Britain and the United States to four ships in the Great Lakes, used primarily for revenue service, as well as permitting the use of forts and garrisons on land around the lakes. This agreement helped to create a peaceful border between the United States and British Canada.^[6]

The Convention of 1818 was an important agreement between the United States and Great Britain concerning issues such as fishing rights in the Columbia River, control of the fur trading station at Astoria, and more generally control of Oregon. Richard Rush and Albert Gallatin represented the United States during these negotiations in London in July 1818. The Convention of 1818 drew the northern national boundary of the United States along the 49^th parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains. With regards to Oregon, both Great Britain and the United States agreed to joint control of this region, which allowed citizens of both nations to have access to Oregon. This agreement also led to eventual compensation from Great Britain for slaves seized and liberated during the War of 1812.^[7]

Those good feelings inspired by Monroe’s trip to the northern and southern states and the successful diplomatic breakthroughs with Great Britain proved to be short-lived. Monroe’s first term in office as president was also his most problematic, with crises involving Florida, Missouri, the revolts against Spanish rule in Latin America, and the Panic of 1819. In addition, Monroe faced a southern backlash to nationalistic decisions made by the Supreme Court. The first episode from a chronological perspective involved Florida and the Latin American revolutions. Spain’s grip on its American possessions was steadily weakening, and indeed, Spanish rule in Latin America ended in 1821, though its control over Cuba would continue until 1898. Monroe and his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, took a measured approach to these developments, much to the chagrin of Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who favored American recognition of the new Latin American republics. Monroe and Adams feared European reprisals should the United States pursue this course of action.^[8]

A bit closer to home, Spanish control of Florida continued to prove problematic. Spain’s control over this territory was weakening, a fact clearly revealed by its inability to control piracy and the Seminole Indians, who raided American settlements in southern Georgia and provided a haven for the Seminoles and runaway slaves from American slaveholders. Monroe and Adams, and the other cabinet members, approved sending General Andrew Jackson to Georgia to deal with the Seminoles. Jackson received permission to pursue the Seminoles into Florida, but he lacked authority to attack them should they take sanctuary within a Spanish garrison.  Contrary to these orders, Jackson invaded Spanish Florida on April 7, 1818 and attacked the Spanish fort at St. Marks. Two British subjects, Alexander Arbuthnot and Robert Ambrister, were captured inside the fort, tried in a court martial for their alleged roles as helping to foment the Seminole attacks on Georgia, and subsequently executed. On May 28, Jackson attacked and seized Pensacola, asserting that the Seminoles were using that port city as a base of operations for attacks on American settlements.

Jackson’s actions greatly complicated the foreign affairs of the Monroe administration. Following lengthy meetings, Monroe and almost all of his cabinet, save for Adams, concluded that Jackson had exceeded his authority and that Pensacola had to be returned to Spain, lest its seizure be regarded as an act of war. As Secretary of War John C. Calhoun asserted, only Congress, and not the executive branch, had the constitutional authority to declare war. In public statements that appeared in the National Intelligencer and in a private letter to Jackson, Monroe made it clear that Jackson had exceeded his orders, though no one faulted his honor or patriotism, and indeed, the Spanish authorities had failed to control the Seminole Indians. Jackson, though, refused to accept any blame for his actions in Florida; instead, he asserted that he had been following orders given to him to end the threat posed by the Seminoles. Monroe wished to avoid humiliating Jackson while also turning the incident to the advantage of the United States. Jackson’s raid had exposed the weak control Spain held over Florida. By returning Pensacola and St. Marks to Spain and not censuring Jackson in a public way, Monroe was able to avoid creating internal rifts between rival political factions while also avoiding war with Spain. Avoiding a public rebuke of Jackson proved difficult because Jackson refused to write to Calhoun about his decision-making in Florida. The matter finally wound up in Congress after Monroe submitted his annual message to that body in December. Opinion was divided as to whether Jackson should be censured. In the end, the popularity of Monroe and Jackson and the desire of congressmen not to appear critical of those national heroes, led Congress to avoid a public censure of Jackson and the administration. One North Carolina congressman offered a prescient warning regarding Jackson’s actions. “’Permit this to pass unnoticed… and some more designing General may seize it as an apology for more daring acts.’”^[9] This did indeed happen in the next century when General Douglas MacArthur started a public dispute with President Harry Truman over military policy in the Korean War. When MacArthur challenged the authority of President Truman and urged the United States to expand the war into China and use nuclear weapons to its tactical advantage, Truman dismissed his general. Monroe did not.  

After Jackson’s invasion of Florida, and Monroe’s skillful handling of the resulting controversy, permitted Secretary of State Adams negotiated the American acquisition of Florida with the Spanish ambassador Luis de Onis. Adams and Onis finally agreed on the Transcontinental Treaty of February 22, 1819, in which the United States acquired Florida and a western border on the Pacific coast, while Spain had its claim to Texas upheld. The latter point was one of deep contention, because many Americans, particularly southerners, argued that the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 brought Texas under American control. Adams was able to gain American control as far west as the Sabine River, thus forcing Spain to give up some of the territory it claimed. Removing the last European power from east of the Mississippi River was a gratifying achievement for Monroe’s administration, but it created lasting bitterness among southern nationalists. This bitterness remained until American annexation of Texas in early 1845, a move that led to war with Mexico in 1846 and the rupturing of the Second Party System in the wake of Manifest Destiny.^[10]

Across the continent, another crisis gripped the Monroe administration and the country, this one involving the explosive topic of slavery and its westward expansion. Missouri—the first territory to be created completely west of the Mississippi River from the Louisiana Purchase—sought statehood. Little appeared amiss with the statehood bill until Representative James Tallmadge added an amendment which would ban further importation of slaves into Missouri and to free the children of slaves already living in the territory at the age of twenty-five.[11] This amendment opened an episode that shook the nation to its core. At the root of the crisis was the question of the expansion of slavery across the Mississippi River, which northern critics asserted made a mockery of the founding ideals regarding liberty that emanated from the American Revolution. Southerners, on the other hand, countered with arguments based on constitutional guarantees that new states enjoy the same rights as the original states and the guarantees to federal rights made to residents of Louisiana in the Treaty of Cession in 1803. The opening debates included statements that the nation would be deluged in the blood of fratricidal warfare.^[12]

The opening act of this crisis ended when the House of Representatives approved the Tallmadge Amendment, but the Senate rejected it. The Missouri statehood bill thus became the concern of the first session of the Sixteenth Congress, which opened in November 1819. Prior to that event, newspapers across the country weighed in on the Tallmadge Amendment as did public meetings, where citizens drafted resolutions that they sent to their representatives and senators. The Missouri Crisis had become something more than a matter of debate in Congress; it had become a matter of great interest to many Americans around the country. The crisis was more than just a plot by Federalists to win back power and the presidency; rather, it represented a genuine concern for the character of the nation, a point that eluded President Monroe and many southern Republicans.^[13]

During the debates in the winter of 1820, Speaker of the House Henry Clay and Senator James Barbour of Virginia came up with a strategy to overcome opposition to Missouri statehood. The District of Maine had received the blessing of the Massachusetts legislature to apply for statehood, but this offer expired March 1, 1820. Clay and Barbour decided to link the Maine and Missouri bills in order to pressure northern Republicans to support statehood for both Maine and Missouri. That strategy worked. Both houses of Congress approved the admission of Maine and Missouri, as well as the creation of a line at 36° 30’ that mandated that slavery could not spread north of this line, except for Missouri.^[14]

The traditional view of Monroe during the Missouri Crisis portrays him as a passive President, one bound by a tradition of executive aloofness, which thus forced Monroe to work behind the scenes to wield influence. As historian Robert Forbes notes, Monroe acted this way out of political necessity. Monroe embraced the nationalist wing of the Republican Party through his support of the Second National Bank and the Supreme Court’s nationalistic decision in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). Given his tenuous ties to Republican leaders in Richmond like Thomas Ritchie, Monroe could not appear weak in his defense of slavery. Monroe shrewdly used his relationship with his son-in-law, George Hay, to his political advantage. Hay communicated a strong anti-restrictionist stance on the Missouri bill, which appeased Republican leaders in Richmond. Monroe’s sagacity sometimes failed him, as when he believed that Northern Republicans would readily support his preferred party position on the Missouri bill because he saw compromise as being in the national interest. What Monroe failed to understand was that it was Northern Republicans such as James Tallmadge and John Taylor who led the effort to restrict slavery in Missouri. In order to overcome these developing sectional divisions, Monroe supported the restriction of slavery and created a network of supporters to champion these efforts in Congress. In return for their efforts Monroe rewarded them with political appointments. When his strategy became public knowledge in Richmond, Monroe retreated to an anti-restrictionist stance and asserted that he had acted out of a concern for the preservation of the federal union. To shore up support for this strategy Monroe used loyal southern supporters, such as John C. Calhoun and Thomas Jefferson to spread fears of disunion. Hold-out Federalists made handy targets for accusations of disunion, as southern Republicans accused them of creating the crisis to win back political power. This argument contained some truth in it, but it also served to obfuscate the genuine antislavery feeling of many northern Republicans and Federalists.^[15]

Monroe’s handling of the compromise legislation exacerbated sectional divisions within the Republican party. There were growing fissures within the party, largely along sectional lines. Monroe originally planned to veto any compromise legislation, but he perceived the compromise as a mechanism that would permit a lessening of sectional tensions. Moreover, Monroe was concerned about his re-election later that year. At the same time as Congress was hammering out the compromise, the Virginia Republican party was meeting in Richmond to choose its presidential electors. Monroe wrote a letter to his son-in-law George Hay expressing his doubts about the bill and his hesitation as to what his response would be. Hay replied that such an approach would doom Monroe’s chances for re-election. He advised that Monroe remain silent, because that silence would signify his intention to veto any compromise legislation to the Virginia party leaders. Monroe followed this advice, and later that year he won a nearly unanimous re-election victory.^[16]

Another challenge Monroe faced was addressing the effects of the Panic of 1819. This financial panic had its roots in the land speculation following the War of 1812 but came to fruition when the price of cotton plunged by fifty percent on the London market. Southern plantation owners found themselves facing financial ruin when local banks, under pressure from the Second Bank of the United States, demanded immediate repayment of loans made to purchase land and slaves. Monroe had a reasonably good understanding of the causes of this crisis, but there was not much he could do regarding policy. One choice he did possess was to champion the proposed Tariff of 1820, which would have offered a measure of protection from cheap imported European goods for the infant industries of the United States. Monroe failed to do so.

Likewise, Monroe had a talented Secretary of the Treasury in William Crawford, but Crawford often had an agenda geared toward his own political advancement. One episode speaks volumes about Crawford. He advised Monroe in 1818 that the government appeared to be on healthy financial footing, yet Crawford later revealed that the government was actually in arrears by roughly three million dollars, which forced Congress to raise taxes, take out a loan, or cut the national government’s budget. Crawford appeared to be using this crisis to attack one of his rivals in the 1824 election, John C. Calhoun, by supporting efforts to attack waste in government spending through his advocacy of military retrenchment. Moreover, there were accusations of widespread corruption within the Monroe administration, most notably in the War Department. These accusations involved the construction of Fortress Monroe in Virginia and the Yellowstone Expedition, a boondoggle in which Richard Mentor Johnson and his brother’s firm overcharged the federal government for supplies.^[17]

But it was not just William Crawford whose quest for higher office created problems for Monroe. Smith Thompson, Monroe’s Secretary of the Navy, also had presidential ambitions. Thompson served as Chief Justice of the New York Supreme Court after a lengthy career on the bench, but he remained quite involved in partisan politics. The opportunity to serve as Secretary of the Navy, and to enjoy Washington society, proved irresistible to Thompson. After the death of Justice Brockholst Livingston, another New Yorker, a spot on the United States Supreme Court became available. Monroe offered it to Thompson, who then hesitated before ultimately accepting it. Thompson resisted taking the position because he hoped to be the presidential candidate from New York in 1824. He even enlisted the help of Martin Van Buren, who was then a member of Congress, by offering the position on the Supreme Court to Van Buren, asserting that such a move had Monroe’s blessing, which it did not. What wound up happening was an exchange of letters that proved embarrassing to Thompson and which ended his friendship with Van Buren. Moreover, Thompson had lied about the President’s offer of a spot on the Supreme Court.^[18]

Maintaining the focus on the United States Supreme Court is important, because Chief Justice John Marshall was placing his nationalist imprint on American jurisprudence. In a series of cases, Marshall and the other justices rendered decisions that greatly strengthened the powers of the national government at the expense of the states. One of the most important of those cases was McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), in which a unanimous Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of the Second Bank of the United States and declared unconstitutional a Maryland law that imposed a tax on the Baltimore branch of the national bank. This decision echoed the use of implied powers that Alexander Hamilton articulated in his defense of the First National Bank in 1791. Monroe supported the Court’s decision because of his belief in the Bank’s necessity, as events of the War of 1812 suggested to many that national governments needed national banks in time of emergency. This decision attracted considerable opposition, especially from Spencer Roane, the Chief Justice of the Virginia Court of Appeals.^[19]

In Cohens v. Virginia (1821), Marshall asserted that the Supreme Court had appellate rights to decide cases where a federal question was at issue. Much like the decision in McCulloch v. Maryland, the decision in Cohens v. Virginia addressed questions of national supremacy when federal and state law conflicted. The final major case of Monroe’s presidency was Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), a case involving the commerce clause of the United States Constitution and the regulatory powers of the federal and state governments. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Thomas Gibbons, who had secured a license under the federal Coasting License Act of 1793. This decision broadly defined commerce and granted Congress the power to regulate commerce into states. The significance of this decision was that it asserted that national power under the 1793 federal act superseded state power in the regulation of commerce. During the Transportation Revolution of the first half of the nineteenth century this decision proved important in giving the national government broad regulatory power to aid the development of transportation improvements. These decisions of the Marshall Court reflected the nationalism of the Era of Good Feelings as well as the acknowledgment of the role of the Supreme Court as the best arbiter of the Constitution. Finally, as R. Kent Newmyer notes, the “absence of a well-defined party organization also left a vacuum that invited judicial activism.”^[20]

One of the major accomplishments of Monroe’s second term was the issuance of the Monroe Doctrine on December 2, 1823 in response to concerns about the intentions of the Holy Alliance toward the newly independent Latin American republics. Monroe and his cabinet feared that the reactionary monarchical powers of Europe sought to reverse the course of history and reinstate Spain as the colonial master of Latin America. Preventing re-colonization of Latin America and keeping alien political systems, namely monarchy, out of the Western hemisphere became important ideological goals of the Monroe administration. Monroe and his cabinet also feared the intentions of European powers toward American neighbors, such as French interest in Mexico and British interest in Cuba. Jay Sexton notes the grave perils imagined by Monroe and his advisers that awaited the nation. “Increased taxation, a standing army, the centralization of political power – all of these and more would be required to counter such a threat.”^[21]

The initial draft of the Monroe Doctrine, written by Monroe and Secretary of War Calhoun, posited an activist role for the American government which included a strong critique of French intervention in Spain and recognition of Greek rebels in their bid for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Secretary of State Adams advocated a hemispheric approach, one that separated Europe from the Western Hemisphere and thus reduced the chance for war with the Holy Alliance. The document delivered to Congress on December 2 asserted the themes of anti-colonialism and non-intervention, including a warning to European powers to stay out of the affairs of the Western Hemisphere and a ban on the creation of new colonies, though European powers could maintain their existing colonies. In addition, the United States asserted it would stay out of European affairs. Moreover, there was implicit support for expansionism, particularly regarding Texas and Cuba, with those two territories expected to wish to join the United States in the future.^[22]

This implicit support for expansionism manifested itself later in the century with the annexation of Texas in 1845, efforts to acquire Cuba through armed invasion by Narciso Lopez, and the rise to hemispheric dominance by the United States after the Spanish-American War of 1898. The first two examples reflected a desire to acquire new land for the expansion of slavery, moves which led to the tragic consequences of the Mexican-American War, the sectional crisis of 1846-1861, and the Civil War of 1861-1865. The last example of hemispheric dominance appeared in the form of policies such as the Platt Amendment, which dictated Cuba’s foreign policy to the new nation, and the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted that the United States would act as a hemispheric policeman to keep European powers from meddling in the internal affairs of Latin American nations. This policy would embitter hemispheric relations into the 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt introduced his Good Neighbor policy to reduce those tensions.

James Monroe served as president during a significant transitional period in American history, from the immediate postwar years to the contested election of 1824, which set the stage for the rise of Jacksonian democracy. In many ways Monroe’s presidency served as a bridge from the First Party System to the Second Party System. Political participation hit a low point in the uncontested election of 1820, only to revive in 1840, when roughly eighty percent of the electorate voted. Monroe’s presidency also saw the rapid westward expansion of the nation after the War of 1812, including the westward expansion of slavery across the Mississippi River, and the growth of a transportation infrastructure that included roads, steamboats, and canals. Finally, there was a legal revolution in which the Supreme Court significantly enlarged the powers of the national government. In foreign policy, the Monroe administration made agreements with Great Britain that demilitarized the Great Lakes, established a firm northern national boundary with British Canada, led to the peaceful enjoyment of Oregon and the acquisition of Florida, and finally, articulated a policy that promised non-intervention in European affairs in return for European non-intervention in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. All of these actions had significant impacts at the time and in later years. One can only wonder what may have happened in later decades if the Monroe administration had secured control of Oregon or Texas, but alas, those events did not become actualities.

We welcome Arnold Kling back on to the show to talk about the new edition of Three Languages of Politics. He hits on how many people talk about politics within certain axes. Progressives operate on a oppressed vs. oppressor axis, conservatives on a barbarism vs. civilization axis, and libertarians on a coercion vs. liberty axis. These axis bind us to a frame of mind that is not conducive to talking to individuals of an opposing viewpoint. If we are aware of our own frame of mind and those of others, we could be better communicators of our ideas.

How do we talk about politics? How should we talk about politics? Why do Trump supporters believe they are being oppressed by the elite? What is pluralism?

Further Reading:

Dunbar’s Number: A Key To Networking, written by Ken Makovsky

Book Forum on the Three Languages of Politics Held at the Cato Institute

Media Bias and Asymmetric Insight, written by Arnold Kling

Related Content:

[The Three Languages of Politics](The Three Languages of Politics, Free Thoughts Podcast), Free Thoughts Podcast

The Three Languages of Politics, Third Edition, written by Arnold Kling

How We Polarize Ourselves, written by Arnold Kling

People may not really know what artificial intelligence is but they are convinced that it will either utterly destroy humankind or lead us into a utopian Singularity between man and machine. But, as philosopher Susan Schneider reminds us, there’s much we don’t know about artificial intelligence, including the nature of consciousness itself. And consciousness, while it may be hard to identify, entails significant ethical obligations, a point that any fan of the HBO show Westworld will quickly grasp. These kinds of questions have been the object of philosophical debate for millennia and it’s a line of inquiry that we should understand before, and not after, we program the first conscious artificial intelligence.

What does it mean to design a mind? What is the ‘problem of other minds’? Why does the consciousness of AI matter? Can machines be conscious? Do you think Androids are conscious? Would we ever have anything like a Westworld with true violence? How much do you replace and you are still you?

Further Reading:

Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, written by Susan Schneider

‘Westworld’ Science Advisor Talks Brains and AI, written by Jeremy Hsu

Transcending the Brain? AI, Radical Brain Enhancement and the Nature of Consciousness, Susan Schneider at the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy

Spacetime Emergence, Panpsychism and the Nature of Consciousness, written by Susan Schneider

Related Content:

The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence is Best Left to Researchers, written by Ryan Khurana

Will Artificial Intelligence Take Your Job?, Building Tomorrow Podcast

There is no doubt that we are in a global tend of authoritarian populism. Tom Palmer joins the show today to discuss how populism comes in many kinds of poison. He points to our disorderly immigration system as one of the reasons that populist rhetoric thrives in the United States. As there is more havoc at the border, it is perceived as an invasion rather than a flaw in our system. Do you think that the Republican Party is the new Populist Party? 

What is populism? Is there a clear distinction between democracy and populism? What is the idea of the ‘loyal opposition’?

Further Reading:

Animal Farm, written by George Orwell

The Terrifying Rise of Authoritarian Populism, written by Tom G. Palmer

The Virtue of Nationalism, written by Yoram Hazony

Related Content:

What’s Wrong with National Conservatism?, Free Thoughts Podcast

Vice in The Virtue of Nationalism, written by Akiva Malamet

Is Liberalism in Danger?, Free Thoughts Podcast

Libertarian perspectives on education are important particularly insofar as both the necessity and historical inevitability of compulsory, state-run schooling are today simply taken for granted by almost everyone, regardless of political affiliation or philosophy. In taking this system for granted, its proponents have given credibility to the insidious notion that it is somehow non-ideological, or ideologically neutral, or occupying a space somehow “outside” of ideology. It is not. Rather, compulsory, state-run schooling is heavily laden with controversial and indeed authoritarian ideological commitments and balanced on a series of tendentious premises. Much of this ideological foundation was “invented by the state when it began a new programme of social control through mass compulsory education.”¹ Rather than undertaking to trace the history of compulsory government schooling, here we will be concerned with this: the ideological content of this system, and its important role as a means of social control.

“School,” writes John Taylor Gatto in Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, “is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.” Gatto identifies seven universal lessons that “constitute a national curriculum”: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, and surveillance. Gatto, himself an award-winning schoolteacher, is famous for arguing that schools, quite contrary to popular belief, are designed to retard the process of genuine education by frustrating students’ natural curiosities, inculcating a self-destructive dependence on supposed superiors, and promoting the unnatural sequestration of the old and the young, among other things. Gatto confronts his reader with a disturbing truth: “that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.” And priming the student to meekly acquiesce to those in command may well be the primary function of government schools.

Compulsory schooling, mandated and run by the government, was and remains a distinctly martial phenomenon—which is to say that it is justified, if at all, on military grounds and maintains the characteristic features of military regimentation. In urging authorities to institute compulsory schooling, Martin Luther contended that if government has the power to conscript people into military service, then surely it has the right and the obligation to compel schooling. Cultural anthropologist Ayşe Gül Altınay observes the importance of universal compulsory military service and universal compulsory education in the “early years of nation-state formation,” as well as the “close link in the way these two institutions were perceived.”² Just as the military was regarded as a school, so did the government school take on “a nationalizing and militarizing role.” If the citizens of the modern nation-state, this new, all-embracing institution, were to be properly “filled with a military spirit in time of peace,” then universal compulsory education would have to be at the heart of this project, for the psychological predicates of such a spirit require constant and careful tuning.³ American government schools unleash a barrage of propaganda on students from kindergarten on, compelling children to sing patriotic songs, to pledge allegiance to the flag,⁴ and to learn war-sanctifying myths about the U.S. government’s role in the world. In so subjecting children, we are, as Tolstoy said, “debauching them in our patriotism,” poisoning their impressionable minds against, and ruling out the possibility of, peace. The citizen the modern state seeks to create, if it can, is one who will accept and carry out without question even the cruelest, most inhumane orders. Because conscience and capacity for critical thinking are, of course, natural obstacles to the creation of such a citizen, they are the attributes to be extirpated by government schooling.

It is probably no coincidence that John Dewey, one of the great apostles of compulsory government schooling, also confidently trumpeted “the social possibilities of war,” seeing in it, as did so many progressives of the time, a path to comprehensive social transformation, to be helmed, of course, by qualified experts.⁵ Through the infrastructure and social regimentation of war, the state could control the economy for the public benefit. War would, he argued, “throw[] into relief the public aspect of every social enterprise,”⁶  harnessing science for the common good by accelerating the “systematic utilization of the scientific expert.”⁷ Dewey’s authoritarian political philosophy assumed social control and then skipped ahead the question of “what kind of social control was desirable and for what ends.”⁸ In Democracy and Education, Dewey correctly notes that “the movement for a state-supported education” coincided with the rising tide of nationalism in Europe. Still sore and tending to their wounds following the Napoleonic Wars, the German territories turned to state-provided education, making it central to the goal of developing “the patriotic citizen and soldier,” loyal to the national state. Rather than attending to the personal development of the individual, government education would be “a process of disciplinary training.” The individual would be subordinate, absorbed in “the ‘organic’ character of the state.”

Dewey and similar progressive champions of comprehensive, authoritarian social control have been the subjects of much-needed historical revision. Influential historian Michael Katz, for example, noted the “darker side to the social thought” of progressives like Dewey, citing “subtle and sophisticated” attempts to foster social control and manipulation. Charles A. Tesconi and Van Cleve Morris argue that Dewey represents an “ideology [that] leads to the type of homogeneity necessary to bureautechnocracy and contributes to the decline of the person.” Progressive reformers were famously contemptuous of immigrants, their cultures and religious practices; they advocated not only compulsory schooling but mandatory attendance in government schools, attempting to outlaw attendance in private or religious schools, which provided havens for minority cultures and religions. Compulsory schooling would prove a powerful and useful tool in the hands of the modern state, cultivating a uniform language and culture by coercively eradicating alternatives. One of compulsory schooling’s primary purposes has been to inure the young early and often to strict regimentation and authoritarianism, to root out the very kind of natural inquisitiveness that leads to learning. Libertarian education theorists, on the other hand, have tended to emphasize the collaborative participation of the student, concerned to avoid impeding the spirit of excitement and inquisitiveness that leads to comprehension of a deep and lasting kind.⁹ It is precisely difference and experimentation that the government schooling bureaucracy is designed to preclude. As Paul Goodman argued in Compulsory Miseducation, the more we get of formal schooling under present conditions, the less education we will get, with an “invested intellectual class” doing “positive damage to the young.” Goodman suggests (what is radical but perhaps should not be) that even the complete absence of school should be preferred to the “intrinsically worthless and spirit-breaking” government schooling status quo.

The work of Max Stirner anticipates many of the arguments in favor of active, self-directed learning, as opposed to pedagogical approaches that treat the student as the passive recipient of the teacher’s knowledge and expertise. For Stirner, education as it exists is fundamentally manipulative, “calculated to produce feelings in us, instead of leaving their production to ourselves however they may turn out.” As Stirner scholar John F. Welsh explains, Stirner sees education (and the process of socialization more generally) as teaching self-renunciation, as inverting the relationship between the individual and the object of his studies; rather than dissecting and digesting the object “as an active subject,” the individual is relegated to a position of passivity, made inferior to something external and alien to him. The liberal and proto-anarchist William Godwin propounded a similar view in his criticism of Rousseau’s theory of education: “[Rousseau’s] whole system of education is a series of tricks, a puppet-show exhibition, of which the master holds the wires, and the scholar is never to suspect in what manner they are moved.” Godwin argues in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice that a compulsory government-owned and -operated education system should be opposed “on account of its obvious alliance with national government,” which alliance he sees as more formidable and dangerous even than the old alliance of church and state. For Godwin, a state education apparatus will inevitably serve to fortify old prejudices, to encourage and solidify mindless deference to entrenched institutions (and, he says, men in handsome coats). Godwin furthermore worries that reliance on the state for their education will put people in a position of “perpetual pupillage,” imparting the dependent mentality of a child who must be looked after. We should instead “incite men to act for themselves.”

Writing in 1937, M.L. Jacks, Director of Oxford University’s Department of Education, remarked on “the progressive assumption by the State of a parent’s responsibilities,” where the school is no longer a place in which lessons are to be learned, but in which life is to be lived. The teacher, here, is not in the place of the parent; he is rather himself the parent. Today, it is difficult to imagine a group more contemptuous of parents and the parent-child relationship than government teachers’ unions. Merely to suggest the idea that parents ought to have meaningful choices as regards the education of their children is to invite the asperity of government school teachers. The very notion of choice is received as a personal insult; why this should be the case is not at all clear, unless of course teachers believe that they should not have to compete, that competition is beneath them and parents should simply accept, in quiet submission, the school to which the government and their ZIP code assign them. How very ungrateful of parents to want to compare service providers, as they would in any other context. Teachers unions have effectively insulated government schools from the assessments or feedback of parents, hindering at every opportunity the chance to introduce choice and accountability. This posture of hostility to the voice of parents is much less about uniquely evil motives than it is about concrete material incentives: when interest groups are allowed to use public policy and the law to protect themselves from the pressures of competition, they will do just that. Concerned observers can hardly fault them, but we can and should criticize the perverse system of incentives that leads to such dismal results for parents and students. Allowing parents some meaningful choice in education is thought dangerous and impermissible because it undermines the state’s monopoly control over the process, curricula, personnel, and the buildings themselves. Subjects simply are not supposed to have the temerity to question the state’s prerogative to be at the center of education delivery.

In the education debate, as in others, libertarians are frequently treated by the “reasonable center” as unserious, bewitched by a radical ideology and so incapable of understanding or making serious policy arguments. If historians and other scholars have acknowledged the dark ideological underpinnings of the government education system, politicians and public policy professionals rarely do. An increase in popular understanding of this ideology of control and cultural homogeneity is important if libertarians are to turn people’s attention to voluntary and cooperative education alternatives.

1. Madan Sarup, Marxism/Structuralism/Education: Theoretical Developments in the Sociology of Education (Routledge 2012), page 167, note 1. ↩
2. Ayşe Gül Altınay, The Myth of the Military Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey (Palgrave-Macmillan 2004), page 69. ↩ 
3. Ibid. ↩
4. Gene Healy writes, “From its inception, in 1892, the Pledge has been a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people.” ↩
5. Samuel Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties from Wilson to Obama: A Story of Poor Custodians (Cambridge University Press 2012), page 25. ↩
6. Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Cornell University Press 2015). ↩
7. Walker at 25. ↩
8. Westbrook 224. ↩
9. See, for example, Colin Ward’s chapter on freedom in education in his Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction. ↩

The Road to Serfdom’s popularity in the United States is much stranger than the Beveridge Report’s success in Britain. The Road to Serfdom had been a small success in Britain, selling out two printing runs of 4,500 copies. It received favorable reviews from the likes of George Orwell, who wrote, “It cannot be said too often—at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough—that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.” When The Road to Serfdom first reached the United States in late 1944, it seemed that it would find a similar niche among scholarly readers and its initial sales of 17,000 copies seemed to confirm that prediction. Everything changed in April 1945 when the popular magazine Reader’s Digest—with a readership of close to ten million—led an issue with a highly condensed version of The Road to Serfdom. The magazine then offered a longer, abridged edition to its Book-of-the-Month club and sold a million copies by the end of 1945. The condensed versions broadened the otherwise weighty book’s appeal by removing the intellectual history—presumably, the average Reader’s Digest subscriber was not interested in early nineteenth century European socialism—and by emphasizing Hayek’s warnings about the threat of socialist central planning to democratic institutions. As mentioned earlier, Max Eastman did the abridgement and his influence shows through, especially when he writes, “It has been well said that, in a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation.” Hayek had not referenced the Soviet-engineered Ukrainian famine in 1932, but a disgruntled former communist like Eastman could not resist slipping it in. Even a popular rag like Look magazine got involved by including The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons, which illustrated the transformation of democracy into tyranny in just 18 panels.^[i]

Unlike the Beveridge Report, The Road to Serfdom did not enjoy the support of the government, but it did benefit from the support of influential, conservative business interests like the National Association of Manufacturers. Historians commonly cite the support of the “conservative manufacturing interest” for The Road to Serfdom’s success and, indeed, often blamed these business interests for the increased opposition to the New Deal in the late 1930s and 1940s. However, the same observation regarding British governmental support for the Beveridge Report applies here; business interests may have promoted the book, but in the end, a million Americans chose to buy The Road to Serfdom and to vote in congressional representatives who opposed the New Deal. The success of The Road to Serfdom cannot be dismissed as a business conspiracy.^[ii]

The Road to Serfdom sold in America because it was in the right place at the right time. Since 1937, American popular support had begun swinging away from the New Deal and central planning. Support for the New Deal began to wane after Franklin Roosevelt’s “Court-packing plan.” In 1935-36, the US Supreme Court had ruled against key components of several New Deal programs, including the NIRA and the AAA. Roosevelt responded by suggesting legislation to increase the number of sitting justices, a change that would allow him to “pack” the court with New Deal-friendly justices. In a radio address in 1937, historian James Truslow Adams questioned the precedent set by tinkering with the courts, “The question is of the freedom of that Court which in the last resort is the sole bulwark of our personal liberties.” Roosevelt’s ham-handedness seemed to justify conservative accusations of executive “dictatorship.” Those fears appeared to be confirmed when Roosevelt then pushed a bill to reorganize the executive branch in 1937. The bill proposed “to give the President more control over the civil service, [and] to limit the autonomy of the independent regulatory commissions.” The practical outcome of the bill would have been “to expand the power of the executive at the expense of the legislature.” One of the President’s political allies warned Roosevelt that people had started “to unconsciously group four names, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Roosevelt.”^[iii]

Despite the obvious hyperbole, Roosevelt’s attempt to centralize authority in the executive branch by deducting it from the legislative and judicial branches rubbed many Americans the wrong way. The United States Constitution codified the separation of powers in order to counter the possibility of tyrannical ambitions from any single branch. Roosevelt’s Court-packing plan was a success in the short term; the Supreme Court—after the death or “conversion” of several conservative justices—stopped overturning New Deal legislation, but Roosevelt could no longer depend on legislative support and he had hurt his image among many voters. The Republican Party won major congressional victories in 1938, 1942, and 1946, and, with each election cycle, it became that much harder for Roosevelt to defend the New Deal victories of the 1930s. By the time The Road to Serfdom arrived, Congress had abolished the National Resources Planning Board, the Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Road to Serfdom rode a wave of conservative skepticism that crested with the Republican capture of both House and Senate in the elections of 1946.^[iv]

It is remarkable that a policy report and a scholarly treatise by two economists from the London School of Economics enjoyed the level of success that they did. Immediately following the war, both men slipped into the background of political events. On the merits of his plans for social security and full employment, Beveridge served one year in the Commons for the Liberal Party but was defeated in the Labour landslide of 1945. He became a town planner in 1947 and continued to serve in the House of Lords. Governments gradually stopped asking for his advice, and he became annoyed with the newly popular term “welfare state.” He dismissed it as a “Santa Claus state,” preferring the term “social service state,” which emphasized citizen’s duties rather than their rights. His biographers have struggled to pin down Beveridge’s political philosophy, a unique blend of liberalism and collectivism. Early in his career in the civil service, Beveridge joined the Fabian Society—democratic socialists who favored gradual socialist reform instead of revolution—and befriended Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Beveridge, while running for the Liberal Party in 1945, understandably downplayed his prior membership in the Fabian Society and claimed that he never considered himself a socialist.^[v]

Jose Harris points out that Beveridge was rather more active in the Fabian Society than he later claimed, giving a number of lectures defending a gradualist form of socialism. Also, Harris notes that Beveridge’s decision to run under the Liberal rather than the Labour Party hinged upon the unwillingness of Labour leader Clement Atlee to guarantee that Beveridge could vote his conscience rather than toeing the party line. Harris convincingly argues that Beveridge was more a socialist than anything else, at least during the mid-1940s. His early belief in free trade and the free market had been dashed by what he believed to be the failure of capitalism in the Great Depression. Furthermore, his policy proposals were “virtually indistinguishable from those of many people in the Labour Party who called themselves ‘socialists’.” By the end of the war, he favored government-guaranteed full employment, price controls, national ownership of utilities, and public housing. If his rhetoric contained “residues” of nineteenth century liberal thought, well, that “could equally be said of the mainstream of English socialist thought at the time.” Other historians caution against tying Beveridge too closely to socialism. Tony Cutler, Karel Williams, and John Williams use the term “liberal collectivist.” Rodney Lowe prefers “reluctant collectivist.” All of these alternative explanations lump Beveridge together with John Maynard Keynes. The problem is that although Keynes favored government “pumping” of the economy, he strongly opposed nationalization and price controls, and other forms of direct government regulation of the economy, all positions that Beveridge favored to some degree by 1945. Beveridge defies easy categorization because he used the language of nineteenth century liberalism while supporting socialist reforms. An independent-minded man to the last, he probably would have enjoyed his biographers’ confusion.^[vi]

Like Beveridge, none of Hayek’s later books—including Individualism and Economic Order (1948), The Constitution of Liberty (1960), and Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1973-79)—had as much success as The Road to Serfdom. In 1947, he founded the Mont Pelerin Society, an organization dedicated to the promotion of market economics and libertarian political thought. Four of its members, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Maurice Allais, and Hayek himself, went on to win Nobel Prizes in Economics. In 1950, Hayek joined Friedman and Stigler at the University of Chicago, cementing the Chicago School of Economics’ reputation as a bastion of free market economics. Hayek’s work reemerged into the public spotlight with the elevation of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1979. Thatcher read The Road to Serfdom as a teenager and continued to follow Hayek’s work throughout her career. In a famous incident, one of Thatcher’s moderate, Conservative colleagues gave a paper proposing a “middle way” for the Party. While he was speaking, Thatcher pulled a copy of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty out of her briefcase and slammed it down on the table with the words, “This is what we believe!” Thatcher heeded Hayek’s warning about the dangers of central planning; she privatized national industries, broke the trade unions, and pursued an aggressively anti-Communist foreign policy.^[vii]

Neither Hayek nor Beveridge expected much from these works at the time that they wrote them. After finishing The Road to Serfdom, Hayek had intended to return to publishing pure economics, his “real” work, but its success convinced him to write political philosophy for the rest of his life. Beveridge did not want the task of reforming social security when it was first assigned to him. After the war broke out, he had hoped for a high position in the Coalition government, perhaps even a cabinet position. He was “heart-broken” when the Ministry of Labour did not offer him a position. Finally, in 1940, he was given a minor position, but then, the following year, “promoted” as a way of kicking him upstairs; at that meeting, he cried in disappointment, but he redoubled his efforts. The Beveridge Report was the result. Neither The Road to Serfdom nor the Beveridge Report were expected to make waves in Britain in the 1940s. Yet seventy years later they continue to shape both British and American political discourse.^[viii]

The fact that Beveridge and Hayek had such sharply divergent views would not seem as strange had they not received such different responses from the people of two nations that seemed so similar on the surface. Since World War I, both countries had enacted progressive social and economic reforms. Great Britain passed the Workmen’s Compensation Act in 1897, the National Insurance Act in 1911, the Widows’, Orphans’, and Old Age Contributory Act in 1925, and multiple housing acts. The United States had gone even farther than Britain, implementing the Social Security Act, ensuring full employment through the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, fixing crop prices with the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and finally regulating competition with the National Industrial Recovery Act. With that timeline of progressive social reform in mind, the Beveridge Report’s success in Great Britain is understandable. The Beveridge Report outsold The Road to Serfdom in Britain by a factor of over one hundred and thirty to one (600,000 to 4,500). Yet, strangely, in the United States, The Road to Serfdom sold twenty copies for every copy of the Beveridge Report (1,000,000 to 50,000). The difference between these books’ receptions in Great Britain and the United States deserves explanation.

Beveridge released Social Insurance and Allied Services to great acclaim. King George VI, long a supporter of social security, held an interview with Beveridge. The Russian ambassador invited Beveridge to the embassy for dinner and praised the report’s suggestions of “training camps” for those “suspected of malingering” (probably a reference to the training centres for the unemployed). When the Russians captured Hitler’s Bunker in 1945, they found summaries of the Beveridge Report that included advice to avoid bringing up this “consistent system…superior to the current German social insurance in almost all points,” but, if publicity were necessary, to claim the report as “obvious proof that our enemies are taking over national-socialistic ideas.” There were some negative reviews, including one from the Women’s Freedom League, which accused the report of leaving a married woman “as before, a dependant and not a partner.” Nevertheless, polls showed that 86 percent of Brits favored the report with only 6 percent opposed.^[i]

Beveridge released his report at an opportune moment, a month after the first clear British victory of the war at El Alamein. Jose Harris notes that the report seemed “to give iconic embodiment to the sense of ‘one nationhood’ engendered by the struggle against Hitler.” Beveridge’s final paragraph tapped into that spirit: “Freedom from want cannot be forced on a democracy or given to a democracy. It must be won by them. Winning it needs courage and faith and a sense of national unity.” Historians, like Richard Titmuss, have argued that the national effort involved in transporting, housing, and feeding evacuees during the Blitz also prepared the people for collective organization and encouraged a spirit of national unity, but Bernard Harris effectively undermines that argument. He points out that there was often a great deal of conflict between hosts and evacuees. Harris quotes Cosmo Lang, then the Archbishop of Canterbury, who complained about “the heedlessness, the shiftlessness, the carelessness and the ignorance” of evacuated working class mothers. Instead of fomenting national unity, the evacuations “probably served to reinforce existing analyses of working-class poverty rather than to change them.”^[ii]

The Beveridge Report succeeded on the strength of a wide-reaching government propaganda campaign. The Ministry of Information distributed condensed copies of the report (containing just the introduction and conclusion) among the armed forces and dropped copies of the report in Nazi-occupied Europe. The BBC broadcast a detailed summary of the report in twenty-two languages on the day of its release. Even the cinema newsreels included clips of Beveridge “looking prophetically white-haired and benign.” The report also benefited when it received an exemption from the normal paper ration (a restriction that prevented additional runs of The Road to Serfdom). George VI released paper from the Crown’s annual allowance for the report’s publication.^[iii]

However, the success of the Beveridge Report cannot be dismissed as a product of government propaganda. While government offices could guarantee Beveridge a large audience, they could not force the people to purchase the report, which they did in astounding numbers. Support for the Beveridge Report was emblematic of a broad consensus supporting social reform in Britain during the war. John Stevenson notes, “The idea of planning had entered the mainstream of ‘middle opinion’ by the Second World War.” The wartime Coalition government issued a series of White Papers calling for full employment policies, social insurance, and education reform. Even Churchill himself seemed more worried that social reform proposals would derail the war effort rather than concerned about the content of the reforms. He, after all, had been one of the early architects of the modern British social reform agenda while a young civil servant in David Lloyd George’s cabinet in the 1900s. In 1906, Churchill proclaimed, “I should like to see the state embark on various novel and adventurous experiments. … I look forward to the universal establishment of minimum standards of life and labour.” During the 1945 campaign, Churchill did oppose a number of the Labour Party’s more radical proposals, but his reticence can be chalked up to the demands of party politics rather than Hayekian anti-statism. Historian Nicolas Timmins goes so far as to argue that Churchill and the Conservative Party would have maintained the developing welfare state had they beat Labour in 1945. To put it very simply, the Beveridge Report succeeded because it appealed to the popular consensus in support of further social and economic reforms.^[iv]

At first sight writing about what was wrong with Grover Cleveland from a classical liberal perspective may seem an impossible task. Personally honourable and forthright, he was the leading ‘Bourbon Democrat’ and so in favour of free trade, hard money and low government spending and against corruption and the spoils system, imperialism, and militarism. He was undoubtedly the most classical liberal President the United States has ever had. So, what’s not to like? Quite a lot actually. If we look at his record during his two non-consecutive terms and think about what this reveals about the nature of his politics (and those of his fellow Bourbon Democrats plus the Mugwump Republicans) we should realise that he personally embodied the limitations of the liberalism of his times. This explains why that politics ultimately failed and was supplanted by both the collectivist nationalism of the Republicans and the Progressive collectivism that captured the Democratic Party after 1896. 

The great problem with Cleveland as President was that although his principles were sound his actual politics was almost entirely negative. It lacked a positive agenda. To draw a sporting analogy, it was all about playing defense rather than offense. As football fans will tell you a good defense is needed to stop the other team winning but to win yourself you need to have an offense that can score. The kind of politics and policies that Cleveland followed had some success in slowing down the agenda of his opponents but they did not shift the discourse or centre of political gravity. This was bad enough in his first term but his second proved to be a disaster for classical liberalism in the United States, when his kind of politics was found wanting in the aftermath of the Crisis of 1893, because of its lack of a positive element.

After a distinguished career in state level politics in New York, including a successful term as Governor, in 1884 he became the first Democrat to win the presidency since before the Civil War, largely because of significant numbers of Republicans refusing to support their party’s controversial nominee James G. Blaine. As President during his first term he did indeed show a significant shift from his Republican predecessors. In terms of appointments he resisted the workings of the ‘spoils’ system, a central part of American politics at that time. Instead of following the usual practice of replacing all of the public appointees made by the opposition party by loyalists of his own party he chose to appoint people mainly on the basis of competence and retained many Republican appointees. Later on as terms expired and retirements took their toll he did indeed tend to appoint more Democrats but again this was done on the basis of competence rather than party loyalty. In foreign policy he pulled back from the more expansionist approach of the Republicans, withdrawing from the Berlin Conference Treaty, which would have given the US guaranteed access to the Congo. In monetary policy he blocked moves to authorise the minting of silver which would have inflated the dollar (which at that time was gently deflating, in line with most other currencies). Most notably he used the veto power more frequently than any previous President, blocking many attempts to give handouts to special interests such as Civil War veterans and, famously, Texas farmers.

However, all of this was negative. It was a matter of resisting bad policies rather than strongly advocating positive reforms and good policy. There was no attempt for example to fundamentally attack the spoils system as opposed to simply not implementing it. The vetoing of special interest bills was not accompanied by a positive programme of shrinking the admittedly small US government of the time or of creating alternatives to government action. The one positive policy was modernisation of the US military and coastal defences. The limitations of Cleveland’s approach were most obvious in the area of trade. While resisting moves to increase tariffs he did not advocate their repeal: rather he argued for a revenue only tariff. After a great deal of effort he and the Congress were able to reduce the tariff – from 47% to 40%. Truly a case of labouring to bring forth a mountain and delivering a mouse.

The obvious response is to point out that he was faced by a Congressional majority that was hostile to his agenda. That however misses the point. The way to advance a political philosophy in politics and public debate is not merely to resist the bad ideas of the other side, necessary though that is, but to also advocate positive change and alteration of the way things are and to put forward the positive case for that philosophy. This has to be done in an effective way and it may not succeed in the short term. However, it is the way to shift the terms of debate and to bring things that were once unthinkable into the realms of the controversial but possible. What Cleveland’s first term revealed, given that he was indeed a thoroughgoing classical liberal for the time, was the degree to which that philosophy had lost the initiative in politics and had become purely negative and defensive.

All this became even more apparent in his second term, which was a turning point for classical liberalism in American politics and in a very bad way. Cleveland was narrowly defeated by Benjamin Harrison in his 1888 reelection bid. Four years later he comfortably regained office, so becoming the only President so far to serve two non-consecutuve terms and therefore have two Presidential numbers. His victory was partly due to a reaction against the increase in the Tarriff that had been put through under Harrison but also because of the rise of the Populist Party, which damaged the Republicans in Western States. This upsurge for the populists was a harbinger. 

Almost as soon as Cleveland took office the Panic of 1893 struck and the US economy was plunged into a severe recession. This was almost certainly due to the monetary policy of the Harrison administration with significant minting of silver expanding the money supply dramatically and provoking a boom. It was Cleveland however who was left to clean up. His response, while principled, revealed even more dramatically than his first term had the limitations of classical liberal politics at that point in US history. He was able, after a monumental political struggle, to roll back the monetisation of silver and restore sound money but he was unable and unwilling to even float the idea of a radical reform of the monetary system to prevent the kinds of booms that had produced the Panic. More importantly his attempt to make some rollback of the tariff policy was completely gutted in the Senate at the behest of vested interests, most notably the US sugar industry. He refused to sign the law but did not veto it. In foreign policy he sought to block the overthrow of the monarchy in Hawaii but again was forced to back down. All of this and continuing labour unrest over the effects of the recession, with a series of major strikes, culminated in the Republican landslide in the midterm elections. Even more significantly the classical liberal element of the Democratic Party lost control of the Party in state after state.

What though could he have done? The answer is that he could have advocated a radical classical liberal policy. This would have involved, inter alia, systematic reform of the monetary system, a full throated attack on the protectionist policy, and firm opposition to the overseas expansionist policy of the Republicans. Above all it would have involved taking the side of labour and small producers against the politically connected large businesses that were the backbone of the Republican Party. In other words a programme of genuine radical and popular liberalism. It would not have succeeded in Congress but it would have presented a clear and positive alternative to the corrupt big state policy of the Republicans, which could have born fruit down the line.

However he did not do this and only sought to try and hold back the tide and preserve parts of the status quo. This revealed the degree to which classical liberalism at this point had become a status quo, conservative doctrine, that had lost the political initiative. That role, of advocating radical reform, now passed to the Populists and subsequently the Progressives. The results are well known. In 1896 William Jennings Bryan and the Populists gained control of the Democratic Party. The remaining classical liberals ran on a separate ticket but were crushed. (They managed to capture the nomination in 1904 but went down to a record defeat). The result of the 1896 election was a decisive one for McKinley and the Republicans who went on to take the US down the road of imperialism, active government, and favouritism to big business. Cleveland was a personally admirable man but his administration was the point where the kind of liberalism he embodied and articulated was tried and found wanting. 

Further Reading

Beito, David T. & Beito, Linda Royster “Gold Democrats and the Decline of Classical Liberalism, 1896 – 1900” Independent Review 4 (2000) 555 – 575.

Brodsky, Alyn Grover Cleveland: A Study in Character. (Truman Talley Books, 2000).

DeSantis, Vincent P. “Grover Cleveland: Another Look” Hayes Historical Journal 3 (1980) 41 – 50.

Hoffman, Charles The Depression of the Nineties: An Economic History (Praeger, 1970).

Kelley, Robert Lloyd The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (Knopf, 1969).

Nevins, Alan Grover Cleveland, A Study in Courage (Ishi Press, 2018)

Sturgis, Amy H. Presidents from Hayes Through McKinley: Debating the Issues in Pro and Con Primary Documents (Greenwood, 2003)

While researching private schools in India for the World Bank, and worried he was doing little to help the poor, James Tooley wandered into the slums of Hyderabad’s Old City. Shocked to find it overflowing with tiny, parent-funded schools filled with energized students, he set out to discover if schools like these could help achieve universal education.

Do private schools exist across the world in the poorest of areas? In third world countries, how do you find private schools? Are there low-cost private schools? How much does teacher engagement matter in education?

Further Reading:

The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People are Educating Themselves, written by James Tooley

Low-Cost Schools Are Transforming Africa, written by Tom Vander Ark

Related Content:

The Education Apocalypse: How It Happened and How to Survive It, Free Thoughts Podcast

Private Lives and Public Education, written by Jason Kuznicki

The State of State Education in America, Free Thoughts Podcast

Cryptocurrency is, ultimately, science fiction. That isn’t an insult. It is science fiction in the sense that decades before you could set up a cold wallet, trade crypto, or hodler Bitcoin, the idea that one day there would exist a vast, distributed digital currency as an alternative to fiat money was a fiction, a thing that existed only in the imaginations of a handful of geeks, programmers, and weirdos. And it is science inasmuch as those same people, through generations of trial and error, actually made that fiction reality.

Professor Finn Brunton joins our show to discuss his latest book, Digital Cash, which is about those innovators—anarchists, socialists, libertarians, and everything in between—and the stories that they told, stories powerful enough to fabricate something worth billions of dollars out of nothing and, possibly, permanently transform the future of money for good or for ill.

How is digital data valuable? How do you find ways that can limit the ways that data can circulate? What does ‘passing current’ mean? What role does trust play in the exchange of currency?

Further Reading:

Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency, published by Princeton University Press & written by Finn Burton.

Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency, written by Finn Brunton

Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution, written by Rebecca L. Spang

Related Content:

The Future of Banking, written by Pascal Hügli

What’s in Your (Crypto) Wallet?, Building Tomorrow Podcast

Facebook Friends Libra, Building Tomorrow Podcast

As the saying goes, “What goes up must come down.” In this case, the ‘what’ are the stock prices of Swiss full-service banks like UBS and Credit Suisse, which are down 50 to 80 percent since the 2008 financial crisis.

The plight of these banks illustrates the coming crisis of the global banking industry. To use Switzerland as an example, the financial industry is losing ground as its contribution to GDP has decreased from 12.8 to 9.1 percent since the financial crisis. In other countries around the globe, things don’t look much better. Deutsche Bank – probably the most important bank in all of Europe – reported on July 7^th that it would lay off 18,000 employees, sending its stock price into freefall. As Deutsche Bank has 49 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives, a full collapse would have significant ramifications for banks around the world.

It’s Systemic Problems, Stupid

From a systemic perspective, banks have been suffering from a flattening yield curve as well as a zero, or even negative, interest rate environment. While that means banks have to pay less on their interest expenses, margins within their core business have also shrunk. In Switzerland, banks have paid CHF 6.3 billion to the central bank since the institutionalization of negative interest rates in the beginning of 2015.

Banks do still enjoy unabated demand for high-profitability mortgage loans. On average, mortgage receivables on the assets side of banks have risen by 46 percent, while other receivables from customers, such as SME loans, have declined by 14 percent. Banks would rather offer mortgage loans because they are regarded a more tangible security in comparison to loans like SMEs. This results in credit being steered away from financing productive businesses to inflating real estate prices. On paper, everything looks fine, but that trend may result in significant downsides for future economic growth.

Yields in the bond market have also dropped significantly. In Switzerland, the entire yield curve for government bonds is now below zero. Collapsing yields means rising asset prices in return, which is how the zero-interest rate environment has boosted stock markets. As financial market intermediaries, banks have benefited from this asset price inflation as they have experienced a considerable growth in volume.

Nevertheless, their profitability has been declining along with their commissions business. Firms like Robinhood or Etoro have ushered in zero-commission trading. Banks have an increasingly hard time collecting commissions on the issue of new loans and securities. The fact that banks are confronted with dwindling profitability despite rising volumes is the result of outdated legacy systems.

Many banking processes are still manually-controlled, bloated, and inefficient. The scaling of internal processes is bumping against a natural limit. As Citibank has found, 70 to 80 percent of all IT expenditure is spent on IT maintenance instead of on acquiring new investments. And on a personal note, try getting the account number for your credit card from Credit Suisse after they have failed to set up your online banking interface. It’ll takes you several weeks, a gazillion phone calls, and even require you to sign paper documents for an online service!

Although bankers might disagree, the traditional banking sector has stagnated and innovation has slowed. It’s not for nothing that we call our bankers “asset managers,” someone who manages or maintains, not a position known for radical insight and innovation.

The Unholy, Financial Triumvirate

Banks emerged out of society’s need to allocate capital by mediating between borrowers and savers. But contrary to what you might think, banking has never been purely about intermediation between the two.

Banks operate from an inherently fragile business model. They bundle many small and short-term savings deposits into large loans with long maturities, which makes the risk of a mismatch in duration a constant reality. @fernandoulrich has a great thread going into the details of the mismatch dilemma.

As long as they have existed, banks—including investment banks, credit banks, and joint-stock banks – have been involved in credit expansion, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Extending credit is actually a vital practice for a well-functioning economy and is evidence of a high trust society. However, there are severe potential downsides once credit expansion becomes institutionalized; in effect, credit expansion incrementally erodes trust, potentially sending an economy into a downward spiral of declining marginal productivity and ballooning credit and debt.

Because credit and capital are inseparably linked, modern capitalism has always suffered from these birth defects. This is not an argument against free market capitalism per se, but a reminder that credit expansion is an inherently risky business. Given that credit expansion is a tight-rope act, a lender of last resort was established that would bail out banks once they inevitably over-expanded. Thus in 1913 the Federal Reserve System was introduced. But this exacerbated the moral hazard and may even have been counterproductive in the long run. Banks, knowing that they can be bailed out by the Federal Reserve, felt free to take on even greater risk.

This isn’t, of course, merely an American story. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, banks emerged around the developed world as part of the triumvirate of modern “capitalist” history: the state, the central bank, and commercial banks.

Here’s how the system functions. Corporations, private individuals, and the State ask for credit in the form of various loan instruments; those requests are fulfilled by commercial banks, thus expanding the money supply. Not only does the central bank issue cash and electronic central bank money, it is also responsible for keeping credit relations running smoothly. As the lender of last resort within this triumvirate, and endowed with the sole power over the base money supply, the world’s central banks have an obligation to support the monetary system whenever the economy founders.

Over the last two centuries, this triumvirate has laid the foundation for a steadily expanding money supply and an impressive financialization of global assets. It is to this triumvirate that we owe our current credit system, including the modern equity and derivatives markets. Together with technological progress, the monetary system has led to unbelievable, unprecedented material prosperity.

Banks have played an important role in this. However, they may have reached peak centralization. They have turned from being a great enabler of economic scalability to becoming an ever-greater disabler of the same, as has been highlighted by SMEs’ struggle to get credit – a clear sign of declining social scalability, which is so important for economic and societal well-being. As a result, many business sectors remain un- or under- banked.

Past the Inflection Point

Big banks function like bureaucracies in that both are tightly regulated. Because they act on an international scale in a global economy, both regulatory burdens as well as compliance costs keep increasing. From 2010 to 2016, annual compliance costs with Swiss financial regulations have more than doubled for Switzerland’s financial industry.

As a result, more bankers are openly criticizing the growing stack of rules, since a lot of their time is consumed by dealing with ensuring regulatory compliance. But many banks have adopted an ambiguous stance on the issue since the higher compliance costs gives a competitive advantage to incumbent firms, which are much better equipped to shoulder the regulatory burden then small, upstart newcomers that cannot afford to have a large staff focused solely on compliance and regulatory matters.

There are other hurdles and disincentives also keeping banks from being innovative. Once a bank is listed on a stock exchange, it has little scope for undertaking significant reforms. There are no incentives for its high earning managers to cannibalize their own business in the short-term, even if doing so repositioned them for the long-term.

Because financial analysts tend to be focused on quarterly numbers, launching an innovative low-fee product for example would crash revenues with dire short-term results. The stock price would plummet, something neither the shareholders nor the managers want because their performance bonuses would be slashed. Managers look for other ways to cut costs instead, including sacking employees.

In 2017, Swiss banks employed 93,555 people, which makes it the first time in recent history that the number of people working in the financial sector in Switzerland dropped below the mark of 100,000. Losing one’s job is always inconvenient, but even the remaining employees are suffering for it as their teams become chronically undermanned and the work load increases. As work / life balance deteriorates, the number of burnouts increases.

Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that banks live off of their artificially high nominal productivity. Although the marginal utility from profiteering off credit expansion has been shrinking, banks are still the greatest net beneficiary (besides, perhaps, the state). But that nominal productivity lets banks ignore the customer to a greater extent than if its productivity was closer to reality. A widening gap between the company and its customers is not only bad for the latter, it’s also unfavorable for a company’s employees.

The greater the distance between a bank and its customers, the less it is clear to the employee what his work in the company is good for. Anthropologist David Graeber defined this kind of job as a bullshit job in his book of the same name, an occupation that is so meaningless, unnecessary, or harmful that even the worker cannot justify its existence.

Those working in such terrible jobs may find that their conscience, named by neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl the “meaning-organ,” has come knocking at the door, complaining about the day-in, day-out lack of meaning. Thankfully, there are innovative startups and fledgling crypto networks that can offer both workers meaningful employment and customers a superior banking experience.

The great unbundling of banks is happening. Amazon is leading the way and other tech companies are following along. Upstart banks likes Revolut, TransferWise, N26, and Monzo are entering the field. In Switzerland, innovative financial technology firms like Viac, Descartes Finance, Yapeal, and Neon have taken up the chase.

Another great challenger to traditional banks are central banks themselves, which have been experimenting with Central Bank Digital Currency or, for short, CBDC. Similarly, to the sovereign money movement, CBDC can be viewed as a tool to cut commercial banks out of the equation by offering citizens a direct account with the central bank. Simon Dixon neatly expands on this idea here, while this article explains why central banks should consider offering accounts to everyone. Obviously, a CBDC would be a huge disruption to commercial banking, both because it would siphon off a stream of customers and revenue and because it decreases the likelihood that the central bank would bail out bypassed commercial banks in any future financial crisis.

In response, the banking industry is attempting to redefine itself by embracing what is called Open Banking. Opening up and standardizing APIs is supposed to turn the banking industry into an open data economy and by doing so foster a cooperative instead of competitive ecosystem. In practice this means that a new banking app, operated by a start-up, can automatically connect to the bank’s relevant client data, feeding that data to its own app thus bootstrapping the services it offers to users.

In the US this is already very much the case. A great example is Nummo, which is a personal financial management platform helping the customer to connect each and every bank account through APIs. In Europe the regulator is pushing for Open Banking with regulations like PSD2. As usual, Switzerland is taking a different route; regulation is not their preferred way of doing things, which is why the Swiss National Bank has been pursuing a more direct access model. Fintech startups can acquire what is called a fintech license, which gives them access to the Swiss Interbank Clearing system.

In this way, new actors are integrated into the Swiss payment system without needing to go through a commercial bank; they will be operating full-reserve banking at the central bank. Since start-ups with a fintech license are not allowed to do any type of maturity transformation, which means they are not allowed to directly manage a client’s money, their current account offering will truly be operated on full-reserve basis. In times of virtually liquid banks, this is a very interesting development.

Will Open Banking be a critical turning point in the ongoing decline of commercial banks? Yes and no. Banks will have to respond by turning into platform aggregators of data. The current state, marked by siloed banks, will transform into an open ecosystem. It seems improbable that incumbent banks will play a major role in shaping the new ecosystems. Tech giants like Amazon appear to be much better positioned to do so.

But not all hope is lost as Martin Stadler, the CEO of Altoo, a Swiss WealthTech company, argues: “Whatever bank offers the greatest API set will have a huge advantage. This implies that banks have the courage to let clients stray. If bank manages to let clients use a foreign service through its own platform, they can still keep their most valuable asset: the customer relationship.”

That direct relationship with customers radically changes most bank’s business model. They will make money by selling good advice and services that have an immediate benefit. Bankers will turn into financial amigos, caregivers, or even chaplains. Here’s an example of how Andy Waar, co-founder of Yapeal, envisions the future: Microservices of all types will be a gigantic business opportunity. Whether you go on a summer trip with our brand-new reflex camera or head to the mountains to ski, you will be able to insure your camera as well as your skis for just the relevant amount of time. You won’t be buying one-year insurance but an actual customized insurance policy for exactly the right amount of time.

When it comes to banking, the data driven business has a huge potential, especially if it is linked with deep, machine learning. However, working with data is a delicate business. As we know from the ongoing scandals involving AdTech companies like Facebook and Google, consumers are fed up with feeling like their privacy and data are being abused. Banks needs to reassure potential customers that they possess data sovereignty and can decide who can receive which data. Primacy in this new style of banking will be won by those organizations which win customers’ trust and as a result receive a critical mass of consumer data, gaining a lasting first mover advantage in the field.

Bitcoin, the Force to be Reckoned With

One additional force to reckon with is Bitcoin and the wider crypto ecosystem, which – in its correct form and interpretation – is open by design and definition.

Swiss banks should fear Bitcoin. For now, the banks are still in first place when it comes to international wealth management. People from all over the world have sought refuge in Swiss bank vaults to protect their wealth from confiscation and other dangers. But Switzerland was a popular destination for global wealth not only for the banking sector’s service and promise of privacy. It was also due to the fact that Switzerland had great political stability originating from its decentralized governance structure.

In addition, up until the turn of the millennial the Swiss franc was equipped with a legal requirement that a minimum of 40 percent of the value of the franc must be backed by gold reserves, which meant that Switzerland was the last major country to run on at least a partial gold standard. The Swiss National Bank has since been forced to take steps to weaken its currency, but at the cost of chipping away at the Swiss franc’s long-lived reputation for stability.

That has widened the opening for Bitcoin to function as a direct competitor to the Swiss franc as well as the Swiss banking system in general. Switzerland might be perceived as a decentralized, politically stable and non-inflationary network, but Bitcoin is growing up to be a neutral, non-centralized store of value with a fixed supply schedule that no human can mess with. Bitcoin might just out-Swiss Switzerland!

In broader terms, Bitcoin might foster the de-institutionalization of banking. Banking is evolving into a set of apps, software, and algorithms. If Bitcoin succeeds in depriving banks of their payment function, their function as deposit providers will also falter. Once you don’t use your bank for payments, you are also less likely to store your money there.

In the age of zero-interest rates, most people’s deposit accounts are also their savings account. If savings accounts are outsourced from banks, they lose their traditional reason for being, which is lending. That will relegate banks to their early historical function as warehouses for gold and other assets, though this time around that will include acting as third-party custodians of private keys for crypto wallets.

In a sense, banks face the fate of the fax machine. As Andreas Antonopoulos points out, fax machines, while dated, are still around, maintaining their niche in old hospitals, backward-looking bureaucracies, and inefficient tax administrations.

Thanks for valuable feedback coming from Nic Carter, Yassine Elmandjra, Rino Borini, Andy Waar, Martin Stadler and Urs Bolt.

The National Conservatism Movement is trying to continue Trumpism long after Trump is out of the White House. Recently, they held a conference in D.C. in order to streamline their message. The keynote speakers were Tucker Carlson, John Bolton, Josh Hawley, Peter Thiel, and Yoram Hazony, whose speech announced that “today is our independence day”. In this episode, Aaron Ross Powell, Paul Matzko, Jason Kuznicki, & Matthew Feeney analyze Josh Hawley’s America’s Epicurean Liberalism by defining what it means to be an American. 

What is the religious angle to national conservatism? What civic virtues does Joshua Hawley value? What does it mean to be American? Should society have a purpose?

Further Reading:

America’s Epicurean Liberalism, written by Joshua D. Hawley

Planned Parenthood v. Casey

The Man Behind National Conservatism, written by Daniel Luban

Related Content:

Social Media’s Moral Panic (with Milton Mueller), Free Thoughts Podcast

What Senator Hawley Gets Wrong about American Identity, written by Aaron Ross Powell

Let’s play a game. I will read you some quotations and you tell me whether you think the writer is a postmodernist or a libertarian.

I believe the great fantasy is the idea of a social body constituted by the universality of wills. Now the phenomenon of the social body is the effect not of a consensus but of the materiality of power operating on the very bodies of individuals.

This surely sounds like a libertarian. It is actually perhaps the most famous of the postmodernists, Michel Foucault.^[1] Here, he is extending his theory about how power circulates in societies to ideas about how social bodies (such as nation states), more often than not, manufacture the appearance of a general will.

Next up:

This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of land at all times.

Aside from some heady language, this also sounds pretty libertarian. It sounds almost like an idea from John Stuart Mill. Again, you’d be excused for the error, because it is really postmodern writers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari^[2] writing about how they believe society should be seen as an aggregate of people (and “flows”) traveling different paths together.

Last quote:

But the basic conclusion that the whole of civilization and all human values are the result of a long process of evolution in the course of which values, as the aims of human activity appeared, continue to change, seems inescapable in the light of our present knowledge. We are probably also entitled to conclude that our present values exist only as the elements of a particular cultural tradition.

Our present values exist only as elements of a particular cultural tradition? That has to be a postmodernist, right? Actually, it’s the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek.^[3]

In what follows, I want to convince you of a middle path. I do not want to convince you that a free society should be grounded on postmodernist ideas, or that libertarians should be postmodernists, or that postmodernists should be libertarians. I want to convince you that despite what you may have heard, postmodernism is not a threat to a free society, and - as I hope the quote game has shown - the two aren’t necessarily enemies.

What is postmodernism? As Jean Francois Lyotard has famously written, it is the idea that we should have incredulity toward metanarratives. What are metanarratives? They are the types of grand stories that purport to tell us How Things Are. Marxism is a meta-narrative. Christianity is a meta-narrative. Postmodernism is a philosophy that gives us reasons - yes, reasons - why no single story of How Things Are is likely to, let alone should, prevail in the world. In fact, one of Lyotard’s primary concerns was how these metanarratives are often used toward“the goal of legitimizing social and political institutions and practices, laws, ethics, ways of thinking.”^[4]

Postmodern philosopher and theologian John Caputo puts postmodernism this way. It is postmodern, not antimodern - an extension, rather than a dismissal, of the modernist project. Just like the modernists - with science and reason - shook up the solidified dogmas of the Middle Ages, postmodernism worries  that modernism has its own solidified dogmas and has come to shake those up. Instead of God, we have Reason. Instead of the Clergy being able to settle disputes about what God Really Says, we have scientists who settle disputes about what Nature Really Says. Postmodernism is about criticizing and dislodging centralized stories.

Some see postmodernism as a threat to the idea of a free society. The reasons we have been given for this are bad ones, often based on a misunderstanding of the postmodern project. Let’s go over a few of these.

We are told that postmodernism can’t be squared with liberal values because postmodernists believe that everything comes down to power. This isn’t quite right. Postmodernists generally do believe that the only thing that makes social orders hang together is power, but not in the sinister way you might think. To see what postmodernists mean, let’s look at how language works.

How do we agree on correct ways to speak and correct usage of words? Most of us learned the rules of language in school, which is a form of power. How do schools know what rules to teach us about how to speak? Their curricula (and those who have the power to write them) are probably influenced by research into linguistics, consulting dictionaries and style guides, etc. All of those are forms of power. We might also learn to speak by watching how others speak, but how do we know who to watch? We watch those who we think are the most trustworthy and legitimate guides - have a certain sort of cultural power - or go with how the majority speak, power in numbers.

Postmodernists don’t conceive of power as just brute force. Power is any influence that some have over others. And without power relations between people, we couldn’t speak, because there would be no rules about how to do so. Postmodernists have been criticized, perhaps justly, for stretching the definition of power beyond it’s conventional use. But as you can see, what they have in mind by power poses no threat to the values of a free society.

Don’t postmodernists not believe in truth, though? Aren’t they relativists? First, I should point out that whether one believes in objective truth doesn’t obviously relate to whether one can endorse libertairan values. Philosophers Jan Narveson and Chandran Kukathas base their respective libertarian theories on the idea that whether there are or aren’t objective truths, we probably will never agree on what they are anyway.^[5]

But the answer is no; postmodernists do not abandon the idea of truth. This, in fact, goes back to the idea of power we just talked about. Here’s Michel Foucault talking about the relationship between truth and power:

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint…. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true…^[6]

For Foucault, “truth is a thing of this world,” which means it is a thing, but something we produce in this world, not an abstract or universal whatever that stands in the ether waiting to be discovered. Let’s think about science for a second. Surely science gets at truth. Yes, Foucault will say, it does. But it gets there only by first setting up rules of the game that scientists must play by. Your hypotheses must be testable and here’s what we mean by that; your experiments must be repeatable and proceed in the following way. If you don’t like these science rules, don’t do science. But without some set of rules scientists must play by - so that we know when they are doing science versus some other activity - truth cannot be produced.

The difference between this conception and the modernist one is that what we can’t or shouldn’t say is that the rules of science are as they are because they are the True Rules. Or, that science is the only - because Uniquely Valid - way to arrive at truth. To John Caputo’s earlier point, saying those would sound remarkably similar to what entrenched Middle Age Clergy said about God.

Some also say that postmodernism yields to collectivism because it believes selves to be “just” social constructions. This objection is easy to dispense with. Libertarians prize moral or political individualism, and that doesn’t require ontological individualism. Postmodernists just point out that to be a self means to be defined in relation to others. Yes, we all exist prior to having social identities. But the only way I or anyone else can understand myself as a self is to reference social categories and my relation to others. That doesn’t threaten the idea that we should all have liberal freedoms. (Nor does it bind me to identity politics. Saying that I can only be defined by social categories doesn’t lead to saying that I’m nothing more than categories.)

What value does postmodernism have for a free society? As a philosophy based on critiquing metanarratives, I’d say the chief value is that postmodernism is a tool of skepticism toward all attempts to centralize one way of life on people. Because of this, in fact, postmodernists tend not to be collectivists, but quite radical pluralists. We can recall the earlier quote from Deleuze and Guattari about the importance of experimenting with opportunities and occupying a “small plot of land.” Or Focault’s skepticism about the existence of a general will. Or there is Richard Rorty, when he says “There is nothing sacred about universality which makes the shared automatically better than the unshared. There is no automatic privilege of what you can get everybody to agree to (the universal) over what you cannot (the idiosyncratic).”^[7]

Postmodernism’s toolkit doesn’t have to be used to defend the idea of a free society. But I submit that there is nothing here that obviously clashes with that idea either.

This article was written as an imagined opening statement I would have given at a recent Reason-Magazine-sponsored video debate between Stephen Hicks and Thaddeus Russell. The debate was titled “Postmodernism is Necessary for a Free Society.” A third position was missing from the debate, though: that postmodernism is neither necessary (Russell) or a threat to (Hicks) the values of a free society.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth. Born on October 2, 1869, Mohandas K. Gandhi was undoubtedly one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. As a prolific author, he documented his own thoughts and actions transparently, in a way that hardly any public figure had done before. Gandhi remains a bit of an enigma by defying all types of categorization.

Less than six months after India gained Independence from British colonial rule, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic on January 30, 1948. The Cold War was looming as a result of constant tension created by countries embracing socialism as an after effect of World War II. Today, the legacy of politicized Hinduism or Hindutva is practiced by India’s governing political party. While those in power have not condoned Gandhi’s murderer, they have continued to eulogize the Hindutva ideology which motivated that crime.

On the one hand, social religious conservatives accuse Gandhi of being a radical seeking to weaken traditional Hindu values. On the other hand, the radical Left, who reject Indian democracy, also condemn Gandhi for his apparent religiosity. Socialists in India and elsewhere have often laid claim on Gandhi’s legacy while ignoring Gandhi’s fundamental critique of the inherent dangers of state power. Liberals are still conflicted between Gandhi’s amazingly progressive social views, and his apparent critique of economics and technology that symbolize modernity and progress.

So, who was Gandhi? And how does he fit into political tradition, if at all?

Quest for Gandhi

No one could have predicted that liberalism as an ideology would be marginalised from the political scene not even three decades since its’ highpoint at the fall of the Berlin Wall.   

The use of the word liberal in this context refers to its’ classical liberal meaning; to depict the political ideal that calls for greater civil, political and economic freedoms for the individual, and less government control. There is a case to be made that Gandhi was both the last classical liberal and the first libertarian^[1].

Exploring Gandhi requires a firm review of the state of liberalism today. Do liberals today realize who they are claiming when they set Gandhi as a prominent figure of liberal ideology?

Before Gandhi arrived on the Indian political scene during the second decade of the 20th century, the Indian National Congress was primarily an association of enlightened citizens petitioning the colonial British government for various political and economic reforms. Gandhi transformed Congress into a mass movement. A movement of this kind had never occurred in the world  before—or since. He engaged with capitalists and peasants, industrialists and workers, the rich and the poor, the socially privileged and the discriminated, the elite and those at the margins of society, in order to build a movement that shook the political and moral foundations of colonial rule.

Non-violent Revolution

Gandhi is easily the greatest mobilizer of people. He will be forever known as the most prominent non-violent revolutionary. While it may seem that his political principles have not found much favour among the dominant ideologies of today, the Gandhian methods of nonviolent mass mobilization persist. He orchestrated boycotts, pickets, and hunger strikes that continue to fascinate the world. The entire political spectrum takes interest in Gandhi’s work because they too would like to mobilize people in this fashion.

An empirical analysis of the efficacy of civil resistance in the 20^th century from across the world shows that non-violent methods have been twice as successful in changing authoritarian regimes as violent revolutions^[2]. The study questions some of the common perceptions that non-violent struggles succeed only in a liberal democratic polity. It also calls in to question that political struggles ultimately necessitate coercion and violence in some form, implicit or explicit, when all other forms of actions and protests for reforms fail.

Nonviolence is  key to appreciating the scope of Gandhi’s political activities. Unlike nonviolence, violence primarily affects common people by replacing those in power and leaving the institutions of injustice and oppression intact. The focus on people rather than on the nature of the institutions, inevitably raises the personal stake, entrenches the divisions, thus intensifying the conflict. This approach of personalizing and escalating conflict, on the one hand institutionalizes violence, and on the other normalizes violence in society.

Gandhi, therefore, sought non-violence, not just as a moral force, but also for it’s strategic and tactical value.

This enabled him to integrate principles and practices of politics in a very creative yet effective ways. He focused on reforming the nature of politics, while looking at those holding power as legitimate political opponents, not enemies, allowing him to cultivate an environment for possible cooperation with the political opponents.

There are countless examples of Gandhi being able to extend an olive branch to those who opposed his viewpoint. For example, General Jan Smuts was the British Administrator who had jailed Gandhi in South Africa. The two confronted each other a number of times. Yet on Gandhi’s 70th birthday, Smuts sent a note returning a pair of leather sandals Gandhi had given him when he was leaving South Africa in 1915. Smuts wrote, “It was my fate to be the antagonist of a man for whom even then I had the highest respect… … In gaol he had prepared for me a very useful pair of sandals which he presented to me when he was set free! I have worn these sandals for many a summer since then, even though I may feel that I am not worthy to stand in the shoes of so great a man! Anyhow it was in that spirit that we fought out our quarrels in South Africa. There was no hatred or personal ill feeling, the spirit of humanity was never absent, and when the fight was over there was the atmosphere in which a decent peace could be concluded.”^[3] In the world today, it is difficult to imagine political adversaries with so little rancour.

Satyagraha or Civil Resistance

Gandhi’s first experiment in Satyagraha^[4] was in South Africa in 1908, on behalf of the migrant and indentured labourers from India to counter racially discriminatory laws against Asians. Although, greatly influenced by Henry David Thoreau’s more passive and personal “Civil Disobedience”^[5], Gandhi turned it into active and public act of civil resistance.

Satyagraha had its share of critics. Apprehension toward civil resistance as modes of protests beyond institutional and constitutional frameworks was not a new fear. At the dawn of independence, B.R. Ambedkar^[6] and others had argued that while civil resistance had a role under colonial rule when people didn’t have a voice, it ought not find any place in independent India with the people electing their representatives in the democratic republic.

Involving more people in political action, however, required better control over the nature of the protests, and the passions of the protesters. The distinctive aspect of Gandhian Satyagraha was the central role of the individuals engaged in political action to suffer and sacrifice, moving towards self-mastery and self-discipline. This was intended to help the volunteers turn the focus inwards, to the moral values underlying the political protests, rather than just the objection of the protest. The staging of the non-violent protests with discipline and dignity rendered the instances of civil resistance into a more persuasive form of direct action, than either physical violence or other kinds of overt coercion and intimidation involved in traditional forms of mass action.^[7]

Reforming the self was a key component of social and political reforms, because Gandhi saw society as the sum total of individuals. This was important since Gandhi sought to inspire his people into political action. Gandhi wanted aware and informed citizens rather than organizing movements using the masses as props.

Gandhi’s approach to political protests evolved as he experimented with ways of narrower localized issues relevant to relatively small, clearly identified groups of people, as in South Africa^[8] and Champaran^[9]. These political campaigns prepared Gandhi for his much larger anti-colonial nationalist movement because in that case he needed to engage with almost every section of Indian society. However, irrespective of the scale and scope of political action, Gandhi always sought to highlight the justness of the cause, and strived to convert political opponents for the cause of justice.

Gandhi valued political reconciliation to ensure justice and peace in society and, consequently, he was always willing to negotiate once the principle at stake was recognized. 

Some look at public defiance of the law as a recipe for anarchism and breakdown of social and political order. Some point to potential for criminalization by surreptitiously avoiding or breaking the law for personal gain under the cover of civil resistance. Others, including some of his key colleagues in the Congress Party felt exasperated by Gandhi’s willingness to negotiate with his political opponents.

Gandhi was aware of these criticisms. His strenuous rules of Satyagraha were evidence not of disregard for laws but of upholding laws that are ethical and effective. Thus through the rules of Satyagraha, he sought to uphold the institutions of laws that were just. This differentiates Satyagraha from an anarchic disregard of laws or deliberate subversion of laws by criminals.^[10] Satyagraha was therefore the means to Swaraj, or self-rule, which was the ultimate goal.

An ideal satyagrahi, Gandhi wrote in his autobiography, is one who “obeys the laws of society intelligently and of his own free will, because he considers it to be his sacred duty to do so. It is only when a person has thus obeyed the laws of society scrupulously that he is in a position to judge which particular laws are good or just and which [are] unjust or iniquitous. Only then does he accrue the right to civil disobedience of certain laws in well-defined circumstances.”^[11]

Mechanics of Mass Movements

As Gandhi ventured into his first major national campaign in 1920, he claimed not to be a visionary, but a ‘practical idealist’. He wrote, “The religion of non-violence is not meant merely for the rishis^[12] and saints. It is meant for the common people as well. Non-violence is the law of our species as violence is the law of the brute. The spirit lies dormant in the brute and he knows no law but that of physical might.”^[13]

Gandhi drew from the daily experiences of people where the overwhelming majority interacted with each other peacefully, in the belief that their interactions are just and proper. Conflicts were an exception, rather than the norm.

The exemplary behavior by the core volunteers, trained for Satyagraha, led by example, which added a moral halo to the cause, helping to diminish the fear of political power. The satyagrahis inspired many and acted as guides for people to follow. With the decline in fear bolstered by righteousness of the cause, more and more common people came out to claim ownership of the movements locally, thus making  the campaigns go ‘viral’.

Increased  participation in the campaigns provided opportunities to deepen engagement with the specifics of the particular issues, and enhanced awareness of the fundamental principles at stake.

Gandhi was very aware of the hazards of passions released once a large number of people began to participate in the political campaign. His organizational genius lay in designing constructive programs to channel those passions. His stress on rules such as celibacy, hygiene and food habits, honesty and civility, and adoption of the spinning wheel or the charkha^[14], were all aimed at imparting self-control.

Gandhi’s advocacy for the spinning wheel was one of the ways he sought to inculcate self-discipline, instil a sense of dignity of labour, and inspire personal independence. Through such productive participation, even from the confines of one’s home, people could feel connected with the larger Independence movement against British rule.

In 1930, Gandhi conceived and led the Salt Movement, which, on the face, was a protest against the state monopoly over a commonplace substance. Today, the Salt Movement has become almost the benchmark of mass movements across the world. But at that time, many of Gandhi’s senior colleagues, including Nehru were not able to fully appreciate the significance of such a common ingredient like salt, with the greater cause of national Independence. Yet the spontaneous participation of millions in the campaign to defy the salt law, showed the British that they would not be able to govern India for long without the consent of the governed^[15]. Even more importantly, the campaign made the Indians realise that the power of the law depends on their consent as citizens. It completely reversed the conventional relationship between the rulers and the ruled.

The combination of participation, practices, and principles rapidly built a sense of citizenship. No formal education process could have hastened or deepened such feelings of belonging to such large numbers as these mass campaigns did.

Gandhi laid out a strenuous set of rules of engagement for satyagrahis participating in various movements. Hartal, typically a day of stoppage or strike, was a common instrument deployed locally and nationally since the Non-Cooperation Movement in the early 1920s. The day of stoppage was announced well in advance to allow the people to prepare for possible inconveniences, even while the volunteers campaigned among the public to drum up support for the cause. But on the day of action, volunteers were asked not to forcefully stop anyone from going about their work.

Political actions are always pregnant with the possibility of violence. Such restraints on the part of the organizers of the protests significantly helped reduce tension on the actual day of action, thus lowering the potential for provocation and violence.

While the idea of nonviolent protest movements have spread far and wide, the gulf seems to have widened between the way Gandhi sought to leverage civil resistance and many of the later generation leaders of nonviolent movements. The Dalai Lama, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela would be among the leaders who were more attuned to Gandhi’s way of peaceful political action, as a reflection of the moral force, rather than merely the force of numbers. On the other hand recent mass protests, such as the Occupy Movement in 2011-12, or the recent mass protests in Hong Kong in 2019, while largely peaceful, also relied a lot on the strength of numbers to force a sense restraint on the state. This is reflected in the entrenched political positions with neither side willing or able to find a way to negotiate with each other.

Gandhi saw civil resistance as a way to accept suffering and sacrifice in order to make the other side realize the justness of the cause, and potentially ‘converting’ them to the side of justice. Most of Gandhi’s opponents trusted him while disagreeing with him. In today’s politics, trust never gets a seat at the table.

However, the declining credibility of politics and the diminishing trust in the politicians themselves are not an overnight phenomenon. The ball had been rolling for a few centuries, and the current lament regarding extreme polarisation in politics is a culmination of that process. The recent rise of populist leaders from across the political spectrum may seem to confirm political polarisation and divergence of ideologies. At another level, populism is also an illustration of convergence of ideologies, where the primary focus is on capture and use of political power, rather than how that power may be used. They wrap themselves in nationalist garb and proclaim the illegitimacy of political critics and their opponents. This is a manifestation of the inevitable breakdown of trust between political actors and amongst leaders and their followers. 

Despite the apparent breakdown of politics at one level, on another level, however, there prevails an uncanny unanimity across the political divide. All sides express complete faith in harnessing the power of the state for their particular political objectives. This means that the purpose of politics shifted from the art of managing political differences, to the practice of capturing power, any which way possible. Then that treasured power is used to hammer any and all opponents into submission or silence. 

It is in this context that Gandhi’s practice of non-violence, becomes relevant not just as a matter of principle, but of extreme practical and political significance in the contemporary world. Gandhi’s fundamental critique of the state is premised on the principle of non-violence. It calls for a deeper recognition of the real nature of the state, and therefore requires a constant vigil to restrain the state to a bare minimum. Only when politics begins to move away from the desire to exercise power over others, can practitioners of politics begin to regain the trust they lost. This may make Gandhi’s politics even more relevant globally in the 21st century, beyond his undoubtedly unique contribution to India’s struggle for Independence in the 20th century. 

If we Americans are ever too hard on our presidents while they’re in office, we more than make up for it once they give up the ghost. A former president’s death brings on the final presidential perks: a state funeral worthy of a fallen pharaoh and a posthumous victory lap in which the departed gets lathered with more praise and affection than he ever enjoyed while upright.

Even by the usual standards of presidential farewells, the December 2018 sendoff for our 41^st president, George Herbert Walker Bush, laid it on pretty thick.  “He was the last of his kind,” Todd Purdum mourned in the Atlantic, “In contrast to the incumbent of the Oval Office, he looms in memory as the valiant remnant of a Periclean age.”^[1] “On his watch, a wall fell in Berlin, a dictator’s aggression did not stand, and doors across America opened to those with disabilities,” historian Jon Meacham eulogized, “Strong and gracious, comforting and charming, loving and loyal, he was our shield in danger’s hour”^[2]

“The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations”

In fairness, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for a faraway time when the president’s most mockable character trait was an alleged excess of “prudence.” And, of course, George H.W. Bush’s reputation has only been enhanced by the disasters that followed him. Nearly every opinion-page tribute drew the obvious contrasts with George W. Bush—the 43^rd president and architect of the disastrous Iraq War—and the erratic and vulgar conduct of the current president, Donald J. Trump. Credit where it’s due: George H.W. Bush comported himself respectably in public and, unlike his son, knew just when to call a halt to an unnecessary war. But that’s hardly the shining epitaph 41’s eulogists imagine.

Grading on a curve shouldn’t mean abandoning all our standards. Presidents are properly judged on their fealty to two oaths: the one they’re required to swear—to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution”—and one that should be implicit for anyone entrusted with vast power: “first, do no harm.” In his brief tenure, the 41^st president flagrantly violated both, to our lasting detriment. Hailed at his passing as “the most successful one-term president in the nation’s history,”^[3] George H.W. Bush has a far better claim to being the most destructive.

He Had No Ideas, Yet He Was a Nuisance

“The vision thing,” Bush’s dismissive rejoinder to demands that he articulate a transformational domestic agenda, became a useful gibe for his political opponents. Even so, the phrase suggested a healthy attitude: peace and prosperity tend to suffer when the executive branch brims with bold ideas.

Alas, on the home front, 41 proved that you don’t need the “vision thing” to be an activist, meddling president. He backed and signed a dozen major bills, a legislative record as frenetic as any modern president’s, save FDR’s and LBJ’s.^[4]

Conservatives have long focused their ire on the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, in which Bush abandoned his campaign-trail “read my lips: no new taxes” pledge.  A betrayal, to be sure, but as Milton Friedman stressed, “the real cost of government, is measured by what government spends, not by the receipts labeled taxes.”^[5] On that score, Bush wasn’t an especially profligate president. He did better at holding down overall spending growth than any of the six presidents who preceded him, including Ronald Reagan.^[6]

More damaging by far was the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). As sweeping and intrusive a social engineering effort as anything since Johnson’s Great Society, the ADA brought a new, and loosely defined, protected class under the umbrella of federal civil rights law and imposed “a de facto universal building code” on nearly every retail business in America.^[7] A boon for professional litigants and the plaintiffs’ bar, the law has mostly failed its intended beneficiaries: fewer disabled Americans are employed today than before the ADA’s passage.^[8]    

The “kinder, gentler” president was determined to deal harshly with Americans whose consumption choices and forms of political protest offended him. “There are few clear areas in which we as a society must rise up united and express our intolerance,” Bush declared in his Inaugural Address, “the most obvious now is drugs.” A more ardent prohibitionist than even Reagan, President Bush ramped up the militarization of the drug war, approving the use of the National Guard for drug interdiction at home.  

Bush also proved himself as shameless a flag-botherer as Donald Trump. In 1989, when the Supreme Court struck down a Texas statute criminalizing flag-burning, Bush led the fight to amend the Constitution by tearing a hole the First Amendment. “The law books are full of restrictions on free speech. And we ought to have this be one of them,” he declared (thankfully, the effort failed).^[9]

Still, if judged solely on his domestic record, George H.W. Bush might rank, as he once feared, as “an asterisk,” in a list of more dramatic and destructive presidencies. It’s in his conduct of foreign affairs where Bush earned the dubious distinction of being a “transformational” president.

Watching the World Wake up from History?

“It really is true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for the President to handle, isn’t it?” a shaken President Kennedy privately remarked to Richard Nixon after the Bay of Pigs debacle: “I mean who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25, in comparison to something like this?”^[10] It’s a sentiment George H.W. Bush expressed repeatedly, if less colorfully, in his personal diary.^[11]

In 1989, the “Year of Revolutions,” Bush could hardly be blamed for finding international relations more gripping than domestic budget battles. His first year alone saw the Tiananmen Square Massacre in June; Solidarity’s sweep of Polish elections in August; and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November.

It’s here, in navigating the end of the Cold War, where 41 deserves some praise for prudent restraint. At the time, critics on both sides of the aisle wanted the president to do some sort of sack dance celebrating the West’s victory in the long twilight struggle. Recognizing Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s precarious position, Bush refused. “I think back to George Mitchell’s stupid suggestion that I go to the Berlin Wall,” Bush wrote in November 1989, “and I think to myself, ‘God, the guy has got to have been nuts to suggest you pour gasoline on those embers.’”^[12]

Yet Bush would be damned if he’d let the collapse of the Soviet empire serve as an excuse for reducing American military commitments abroad. There would be no postwar return to “normalcy” on his watch: instead, Bush forged “the greatest transformation of American foreign relations since World War II.”^[13]

On December 2, 1989, less than a month after the Wall fell, Bush and Gorbachev met at the Malta Summit, where Gorbachev effectively declared an end to the Cold War.  After leaving Malta, Bush got exasperated when a reporter pressed him to agree with Gorbachev: “Things have moved dramatically. But if I signal to you there’s no Cold War, then it’s ‘What are you doing with troops in Europe?’ I mean, come on!”^[14]

That was the sort of question many Americans were asking at the time. Why couldn’t the U.S. return to its traditional policy of “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none”? Talk of deep defense cuts and the “peace dividend” animated Capitol Hill. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) introduced an “End of the Cold War Act” that would have shut down the CIA.^[15] “Who’s the enemy? I keep getting asked that,” Bush complained to his diary: “It’s apathy; it’s the inability to predict accurately; it’s dramatic change that can’t be foreseen…. there’s all kinds of potential instability that requires a strong U.S. presence.”^[16]

By the end of 1989, the monster we’d gone abroad to destroy had been defanged and domesticated. “Apathy” wouldn’t do for a replacement nemesis. If America was to remain “engaged” abroad, new monsters would have to be identified. Not three weeks after the Malta Summit, America was at war again. 

“Operation Just Because”

Panamanian strongman General Manuel Noriega had been a CIA asset for decades, but by the mid-80s, the drug-running dictator had become an embarrassment to the Reagan-Bush administration. In May 1989, after Noriega cancelled the results of a presidential election won by his opponents, Bush ordered the Joint Chiefs to draw up a plan for regime change.

In December, when Panamanian soldiers killed a U.S. Marine, Bush got the excuse he needed to act.^[17] In his televised address to the nation on December 20, the president offered a broad rationale for intervention: we’d gone to war not just to protect U.S. citizens, but “to defend democracy in Panama.”^[18] The invasion, initially dubbed “Operation Blue Spoon,” got a last-minute rebranding from the Pentagon, to the question-begging “Operation Just Cause.”^[19] Some wisecracking U.S. officers dubbed it “Operation Just Because.”

Launched without any congressional authorization, Just Cause, with over 25,000-troops, was at the time the largest U.S. military operation since the Vietnam War. Cato’s Ted Galen Carpenter argues that the Panama precedent was pivotal: at a key moment, “it set America on a renewed path of intervention.” The rationales Bush 41 invoked for regime change were used to justify a host of humanitarian excursions over the next three decades: “After the Berlin Wall fell, the war against the Noriegas of the world could begin.”^[20]

War of Choice in the Gulf

The Persian Gulf War featured prominently in December 2018’s encomia to the late President Bush. Most eulogists praised Bush Senior for using power cautiously, drawing a sharp contrast between  41’s prudence in 1991 and 43’s reckless decision to launch a “war of choice” in 2003.^[21] Reasonable people are allowed to disagree about how the Gulf War should have ended, it seems, but not about whether America should have fought it in the first place.

But both wars were wars of choice. And the consequences of the Gulf War—which fueled the rise of Al Qaeda and kicked off America’s Thirty Years War in the Middle East—may, in the long run, have been more disastrous than the younger Bush’s ill-fated decision to “finish the job” in 2003.

On August 2, 1990, when a debt-strapped Saddam Hussein opted to “take the oil” by invading his weaker neighbor, even Bush’s National Security Council doubted that restoring the Kuwaiti emirate was worth American blood and treasure. President Bush summed up the dominant NSC view in his diary: “It’s halfway around the world; U.S. options are limited; and all in all it is a highly complicated situation.”^[22]

But in a matter of days, after some bracing by National Security adviser Brent Scowcroft and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,^[23] the president decided “This will not stand.”  On August 8, he announced the dispatch of U.S. forces to Saudi Arabia in Operation Desert Shield, a mission he described as “wholly defensive.”^[24] 

In that speech, Bush emphasized high principle: “the acquisition of territory by force is unacceptable.” But soon, the administration’s emphasis would shift to energy security and “jobs, jobs, jobs.”  Secretary of State James Baker raised the specter of “a dictator who, acting alone and unchallenged, could strangle the global economic order, determining by fiat whether we all enter a recession or even the darkness of a depression.”^[25] 

That was nonsense: as David Henderson, former senior energy economist for Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, explained at the time, the “vaunted ‘oil weapon’ is a dud.” Even if Saddam Hussein were to achieve monopoly power over Persian Gulf oil, some 20 percent of global output, the dictator’s ability to inflict pain on the United States would be limited from the first, and rapidly undercut by market forces. “The annual cost of doing nothing in the Gulf” would, Henderson calculated, amount to “at most one-half of one percent of GNP”—or an extra 24 cents per gallon at the pump.^[26]

Indeed, the immediate aftermath of the August 1990 invasion shows how rapidly oil markets were able to adapt. International sanctions against Iraq had taken nearly 9 percent of world oil production offline, but four months after Hussein seized Kuwait, global output had returned to normal, thanks to increased supply from other producers.^[27]

Henderson based his calculations on a worst-case scenario that included an Iraqi conquest of Saudi Arabia. The evidence that Hussein plotted any such thing is mixed at best. Despite some menacing troop movements in early August,^[28] “no plans were found as coalition forces sifted through the debris of the Iraqi military after the war.”^[29]

In any case, deterring such an attack would hardly have required the 200,000-plus U.S. troops deployed to Saudi soil at the start of Desert Shield. U.S. airpower could strike with impunity at any armored force moving through open desert,^[30] and, as Christopher Layne observed in Desert Storm’s aftermath, “a limited and temporary U.S. air, naval, and ground presence would have sufficed to dissuade the Iraqis from further aggression and to buy time for Saudi Arabia and its regional allies to organize an all-Arab defense of the desert kingdom.”^[31]

If a key goal of the international effort was demonstrating “crime doesn’t pay,” the sanctions regime had already made that clear, reducing Iraq’s GDP by some 40 percent.^[32] As Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson explained, Saddam was unable to export oil, like a bank robber who had laid “his hands on the gold within the vault, only later to discover he was locked inside.”^[33]

“We Have Tried Hard for Peace”

In their 1992 book The Imperial Temptation, Tucker and Hendrickson argue convincingly that a policy of “punitive containment” could have achieved key U.S. goals, even the eventual disgorgement of Kuwait, without bloodshed.^[34] That was the approach advocated by Baker and Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell, the doves in Bush’s war cabinet. But Bush was never terribly interested in options that might preclude war.

In fact, the president’s diary entries show him pining for a pretext that could get the shooting started.^[35] On October 17, 1990, he wrote: “some members of Congress feel I might use a minor incident to go to war, and they may be right.” An embassy rescue mission might do the trick, Bush mused: if Iraqis fired on U.S. forces, Americans would support “knocking the hell out of this guy.” “Curiously in this scenario,” writes biographer Timothy Naftali, “Bush appeared prepared to sacrifice the lives of some of the diplomats.”^[36]

That month, President Bush ramped up the rhetoric, labelling Saddam Hussein “Hitler revisited.” He also approved a plan to surge another 200,000 troops to Saudi Arabia for an “offensive military option”—but held that information from the public until after November’s midterm elections.

At this point, a congressional debate was unavoidable. In public Bush insisted authorization was optional; privately, he’d already decided to launch the war with or without Congress: “If they are not going to bite the bullet, I am,” Bush wrote in his diary about a week before the vote, “They can file impeachment papers if they want to.”^[37]

To undercut the perception that the president was bent on war, the administration sent Secretary of State Baker to Geneva for a last-minute meeting with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz.  Scowcroft rebuked Baker and Powell for hoping Iraq would agree to unconditional withdrawal: “Don’t you realize that if he pulls out, it will be impossible for us to stay?” Bush agreed: “we have to have a war.”^[38]

They needn’t have worried. Geneva, predictably, was a bust, and Congress voted to authorize the use of force. By sending half a million troops to the Iraqi border, the president had made the vote a fait accompli.^[39] “I didn’t have to get permission from some old goat in the United States Congress to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait,” he later bragged to fellow Republicans.^[40]

On the last day of 1990, as the UN deadline for Iraqi withdrawal approached, Bush wrote an impassioned—if self-serving—letter to his children: “I have the peace of mind that comes from knowing that we have tried hard for peace,” he insisted. “When the question is asked ‘How many lives are you willing to sacrifice?’—it tears at my heart. The answer, of course, is none- none at all…. every human life is precious, the little Iraqi kids’ too.”^[41]

At the time, it was reasonable to assume that war would cost the lives of hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi civilians, including children. That was a sacrifice the president was willing to make, rather than run the political risk of sanctions and containment.^[42] 

In the event, military casualties were lighter than expected—148 coalition troops killed in action, perhaps 20,000 on the Iraqi side—as the vaunted “fourth largest army in the world” melted in the face of a 42-day bombing campaign and a 100-hour ground war.^[43] Over 2,000 Iraqi civilians died as a direct result of the bombing^[44]; thousands more likely perished as an indirect result of the air-war’s damage to Iraq infrastructure.^[45] Still more—30,000 to 60,000 Shiites and some 20,000 Kurds—fell in Saddam’s brutal suppression of uprisings stoked by Bush’s call for Iraqis to “take matters into their own hands.”^[46] As John Mueller sums up, “pushing Iraq from Kuwait eventually brought about the deaths of a hundred or two hundred times more people than were killed by the Iraqis in their invasion and conquest” of Kuwait.^[47]

“A World Transformed”

“By God,” President Bush proclaimed when the war was over, “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” Alas, winning in such spectacular fashion gave the U.S. national security establishment leave to be a lot less prudent. In the coming decade, U.S. military intervention would reach a pace it never hit during the height of the Cold War.^[48]

Meanwhile, for the United States and the Middle East, the long-term costs of the Gulf War would grow even steeper. Desert Storm pulled America into a deepening entanglement, including 12 years of debilitating sanctions and no-fly zones, punctuated by punitive air raids—all of which became rallying points for Islamic radicals.^[49]

For Osama Bin Laden, watching American troops on Saudi soil launch the attack on Iraq “was as transforming an event as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan had been a decade earlier,” Peter Bergen writes. Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, were timed for August 7 to mark the date the first US troops for Desert Shield arrived eight years earlier.^[50] As then-deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz testified to Congress in 2003: “it is that American presence in the holy land of Saudi Arabia and the sustained American bombing of Iraq as part of that containment policy that have been Osama bin Laden’s principal recruiting device.”^[51]

History doesn’t allow us to run the counterfactual: it’s entirely possible that the United States would have faced a threat from Islamic terrorism had the Bush administration opted a solution short of war. But it’s also possible that another path would have left the Towers standing, sparing America and the world from the disasters that followed 9/11.

The “L-Word”

The rest of the story is familiar. The president set a Gallup record in the afterglow of the Gulf War, hitting 89 percent approval. But martial glory, however splendid, didn’t translate into lasting popularity or electoral victory.

The deep funk Bush fell into after losing reelection didn’t deter him from forcefully wielding the powers of the presidency on his way out the door. On December 4, Bush ordered 28,000 troops into the middle of Somalia’s ongoing civil war. “”Our mission is humanitarian,” Bush insisted, but signaled the potential for mission creep that, under President Bill Clinton, would lead to the Black Hawk Down debacle the next year: “outlaw elements” should understand that U.S. forces would “take whatever military action is necessary.”^[52]

Then, on Christmas Eve 1992, Bush pardoned former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and five other Iran-Contra figures. It was a self-serving misuse of executive power that put an end to a trial, Weinberger’s, in which Bush himself might have been called as a witness.^[53] Publicly, the president puffed that the decision flowed naturally from his longstanding dedication to “honor, decency, and fairness.” Privately, he worried that the pardons would “put a tarnish, a kind of a downer, on our legacy.”

In his later years, George Herbert Walker Bush affected disdain towards any discussion of his legacy: “I’ve banned the ‘L’ word in our office,” he said in 2010, “let the historians figure out what we got right and what I got wrong.”^[54] Unfortunately, the scholars who fill out the presidential ranking scorecards hardly subscribe to the notion that the historian should be a “hanging judge.” Instead, they tend to reward imperial presidents—crusaders who shrug off constitutional limits in pursuit of “transformational” visions—regardless of the destruction they leave in their wake.^[55] By that perverse metric, George H.W. Bush has few equals.

Since the 2016 election, college campuses have erupted in violent protests, demands for safe spaces, and the silencing of views that activist groups find disagreeable. Robby Soave has gone in to the trenches to catalog these young radicals in order to better understand the climate at universities across America.

When did college campuses become sites of harsh public discourse? How has the culture around safety changed on college campuses? Is there a crisis on college campuses? Are we chilling our professors in order to not hurt students’ feelings? What is intersectionality? Why are students claiming that their professors are triggering their PTSD?

Further Reading:

Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, written by Robby Soave

Penn law professor faces backlash, petition to resign over ‘repugnant’ comments on race and immigration, written by Owen Daugherty

Do controversial figures have a right to speak at public universities?, written by Holly Epstein Ojalvo

Campus Rights, FIRE

Related Content:

The Coddling of the American Mind (with Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff), Free Thoughts Podcast

Campus Freedom, Free Thoughts Podcast

Conformist Students Fear Disagreement, written by Natalie Dowzicky

The recent shootings in El Paso and Gilroy are a reminder of the power of the internet to build communities for niche interests, from vampire fan fiction aficionados to neo-Nazis. The El Paso shooter posted his manifesto to 8chan, a hub for dank memes and hateful content alike. Timothy McLaughlin joins the show to explain where 8chan came from and the personalities people behind its founding.

Then Paul, Matthew, and Will discuss the ways that online radicalization of the alt-Right is both similar to past waves of terrorist radicalization and dissimilar in that it is stochastic and requires less organizational structure. Finally, they caution against government overreaction to the legitimate problem of online radicalization, given that most of the proposed measures wouldn’t work, might even backfire, and would create significant, ill, and unintended consequences for positive online social movements.

What is 8chan? How is 8chan organized? Who created 8chan and what was its’ original purpose? How should forms of exchange be regulated in the wake of horrific events? Does the use of mass communication inspire people to commit terrible acts of terror? Why are criminal manifestos posted on 8chan? What is stochastic terrorism? How should government respond to the problem of online radicalization?

Further Reading:

The Weird Dark History of 8Chan, written by Timothy McLaughlin

Trump wants social media to detect mass shooters before they commit crimes, written by Rani Molla

‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says the Creator of 8chan, a Megaphone for Gunmen, written by Kevin Roose

Related Content:

Haters Gonna Hate Speech, Building Tomorrow Podcast

How the FOSTA Rules Create a “Bootleggers and Baptists” Scenario for the 21st Century, written by Paul Matzko

What Made the Internet Possible?, Building Tomorrow Podcast

The New York Times Magazine recently released its “1619 Project,” an initiative marking the 400th anniversary of the first African slaves arriving in North America. The project is ambitious, aiming to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.” A collection of pundits have framed this project as an attempt to “delegimitize” the United States. Such commentary provides an opportunity to consider the state of American race relations and the role of slavery in American history. 

Whether or not the foundation of the United States was legitimate is an interesting political, moral,  and historical question. You can spend a career considering questions about when political violence is justified, what fair representation in a democracy looks like, how to measure and secure the consent of the governed, and what political system best secures natural rights. But these aren’t the kinds of questions many 1619 Project critics have in mind when they accuse it of “delegimitizing” the United States. They’re concerned that highlighting America’s brutal history of slavery and its role in forming the United States undermines the American project; an experiment in self-government. 

The relationship between black people and the white institutions that oppressed them is one of the most consequential features of American history. The most prominent of America’s contradictions is that its Founding documents were written by white men who owned black human beings as farm equipment, yet they expressed a commitment to liberty. 

Thomas Jefferson, the man who believed that it was “self-evident” that all men are created equal owned slaves. James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution” and author of many of The Federalist Papers, also owned slaves and was skeptical of free African Americans being a part of the American polity. After leaving the White House Madison served as the president of the American Colonization Society, which urged freed black people to move to Africa. 

During the Revolutionary War, the British frigate HMS Savage sailed up the Potomac River, its troops burning houses in Maryland in view of Mt. Vernon, George Washington’s Virginia estate. The Royal Governor of Virginia John Murray had earlier issued a proclamation, offering freedom to slaves who fought for Britain. A wartime necessity rather an endorsement of full-throated emancipation to be sure, but it’s nonetheless telling that seventeen of Washington’s slaves fled Mt. Vernon and boarded HMS Savage. To a Virginia slave, housing in a British warship was preferable to the slave quarters belonging to the man who would become the first president of the United States.  

Bewilderment at slave owners proclaiming a devotion to liberty is hardly reserved to 21st century. In a 1775 essay on the American colonies the English writer Samuel Johnson asked not unreasonably, “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” The Founding Father John Adams never owned slaves and opposed slavery, though favored gradual erosion of the instution rather than outright and immediate abolition. His wife Abigail understood the contradiction of the American Founding:

I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for Liberty cannot be Equally Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs. Of this I am certain that it is not founded upon that generous and Christian principal of doing to others as we would that others should do unto us… .

That the Founding generation included moral hypocrites is hardly surprising. Every collection of human beings has included flawed people. Anyone scouring history books in search of moral perfection will be left disappointed. 

It’s not clear that the moral hypocrisy of some of America’s founders delegitimizes the United States per se. At worst such hypocrisy makes the founding of the United States far from perfect. Even those who think that it’s a stretch to say that the United States was founded “on” racism can hardly deny that it was founded with racist institutions explicitly protected. The evils of slavery don’t in and of themselves negate the colonists’ complaints about a lack of representation in Parliament or the fact that British officials had subjected colonists to needless, intrusive searches and other abuses against their civil rights. But they shouldn’t be overlooked. 

What is clear is that the United States has yet to fully come to terms with its history of racial violence and oppression. In large part this is because we’re accustomed to measuring our race relations progress through the lenses of military, political, and legislative victories. 

Hundreds of thousands of Americans died in the wake of an illegitimate attempt at secession predicated on the preservation of slavery. The Civil War amendments to the Constitution certainly improved the document, but they hardly erased a culture of violence and racism that made them a necessity. 

The North won the Civil War, the South won Reconstruction. The explicit exemption of blacks from civil rights and political participation in the South as well as the emergence of a racist domestic terrorist organization are all evidence that wars and Constitutional amendments hardly erase cultures that took centuries to develop. A century after Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, racists were murdering civil rights activists in the Jim Crow South. Thousands of black people had been lynched during those hundred years. Others were subjected to medical experiments. Segregation, bans on interracial marriage, and many other indignities were imposed by white-majority legislatures. 

We can and should applaud the progress that the U.S. has made since its founding while accepting that there is much work to be done. Such work requires an honest look at history that treats the Founding Fathers and America’s founding documents as men and historical writings, not prophets and religious texts. 

Although decades have passed since the civil rights movement American institutions continue to reflect America’s racist history. Law enforcement and criminal justice are perhaps the most prominent and obvious examples, but we shouldn’t ignore the impact racism has had on housing policy, education, and economic regulations. This history of course doesn’t imply that everyone who works in law enforcement, housing, and education or advocates for minimum wage increases is a racist, but it should be considered when discussing the ongoing impact of race relations on American society.  

We should also consider modern moral hypocrisies and racial language. Today, many people who claim to support “liberty” protest the removal of statues of Confederate generals who fought to preserve slavery. More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, a city worker in New Orleans wore body armor and a face covering while removing a statue of Confederate leader Jefferson Davis. 

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), a member of the “Freedom Caucus,” won re-election despite saying that President Obama should be sent “back home to Kenya or wherever”(he has since disowned the comments). The whole Obama presidency is full of examples of thinly veiled racial language being used against the president and his family. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) has used racist language and adorned his desk with a Confederate flag, which he displayed without any hint of irony alongside the American flag.

If initiatives like The 1619 Project can help Americans better understand their history and institutions then they should be applauded. I’ve yet to read the 1619 essay collection in full, and I’m sure that I’ll have some disagreements with some of its contributors. The essay on the link between slavery and the “brutality of American capitalism” looks ripe for educated criticism.

It’s important for an honest look at American institutions and history because the United States - unlike France and Greece - was founded on a set of principles. French and Greek identities have endured despite Greece and France being governed by a wide range of political regimes (republics, parliaments, monarchies, occupations, etc.). Yet there’s a sense in which American identity is tied to the political commitment outlined in the Declaration: a government tasked to securing rights endowed to all people. 

I am bound to that commitment. I took an oath to the Constitution when I became and American citizen ten years ago. I did so gladly, knowing that the document and the men who ratified it were imperfect. But such imperfections didn’t dent my budding patriotism. Anyone with a family and friends knows that you can love something that isn’t perfect. My relationship with my country is like my relationship with anyone: it improves with increased honesty, reflection, and candor. 

As social media platforms grow it is apparent that they will never be able to make decisions that will appease everyone. We should also recognize that calls for government-induced content moderation will make these platforms battlegrounds for a perpetual intensifying conflict over who gets to silence whom.

What is a moral panic? Why are people panicked over fake news? How addictive is social media? What is Section 230 and what implications does it have for social media companies? What is a social media platform?

Further Reading:

Challenging the Social Media Moral Panic: Preserving Free Expression under Hypertransparency, written by Milton Mueller

False Assumptions Behind the Current Drive to Regulate Social Media, written by John Samples

What Senator Hawley Gets Wrong about American Identity, written by Aaron Ross Powell

Related Content:

What Made the Internet Possible?, Building Tomorrow Podcast

Free Speech Online: Unfriended, Building Tomorrow Podcast

The Problem with “Fake News”, written by Ryan Khurana