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Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com.
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And now the Good fight with Yasha Monk.
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Hi everyone, I'm Sahil Handa and I am a contributing editor at Persuasion. I wrote a piece recently called the Liberalism in Our Institution Institutions and it was basically my attempt to diagnose why as I see it, mainstream once liberal institutions like Harvard and the New York Times, etc. Have taken a turn towards appealing a kind of fanatical, I guess we would call it woke base and why they're kind of doing the actions that they are that we all tend to decry in publications like ours. And I think counter to what a lot of people on say our side of the so called culture wars like to say. I don't think that it's simply because these two organizations are stupid and spineless. I think more it's a matter of the incentive structures that are facing them today with publications. I think that's an outcome of business model. I think the Internet has made it such that the most viable path to sustainability for any large publication is a subscription model. Already any publication is a subscription model and that means that it places the journalists more at the mercy of those who are paying for the publication rather than in the past when it was kind of advertisers compensating all of the writers. And then in higher ed, I think it's really the admission process has entirely changed such that now there's an incredibly small segment socio economically, not just that, but also politically who are told that they have gone in a place at university because they are deserving of it. And most of them basically go by the social cues that are set in stone by a kind of a small segment, the woke private school educated, boarding school educated segment of the student population. So you end up with these massive distortions. And so I delve a bit into technology and the Internet and how that changed business models in both higher and education and journalism. And I dive a bit into how the admissions kind of pipeline into these institutions has changed the culture as well. So it's definitely more of an explorative piece. I'm working on a book about the same problem on a kind of macro level on elite college campuses. So this is really my attempt to just kind of work out a few of the themes that I'm thinking about there and put them on the page. So that I can get good feedback and good arguments made in different directions. So I hope you enjoy it and keep reading Persuasion. Thank you.
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Sahil Handa's piece called the Illiberalism in Our Institutions was published by Persuasion. To learn more about the community we're building at Persuasion and to get similar articles directly into your inbox, head to www. Persuasion.community.
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my guest today is Caitlin Flanagan. Caitlin is a staff writer at the Atlantic. She is one of my favorite writers today. She just has a voice and a style that is unrivaled and she has fought deeply about a whole range of issues from private schools in America to our cultural moment to a really interesting article on abortion. We had a fun, rollicking, wide ranging chat and debate. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did. Caitlin Flanagan, welcome to the podcast.
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Thank you. Thank you so much.
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B
I'm really so excited to have you on the podcast because I'm a huge fan of your writing. We're chatting a little bit just now and I realized that I didn't know that you actually grew up in Berkeley and sort of really at the height of the free speech movement. Tell us a little bit what that was like and how that informs how you see the world today.
- [04:46]
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Okay. Well, I'm old, so I was born in 1961 and my father and mother, they were like most Berkeley professors at that time, weren't Californians. They'd come from other places because there was this huge expansion of American universities in the post war years. So my father had survived the war in the Pacific and the war with Lionel Trilling, and he had a dissertation and he had a job at Berkeley and they were like, you know, New York intellectual lefties. My mom, strictly speaking, a housewife of the year, but she was very well read person and very interesting person. And so my childhood, my infancy, everything was just imbibing the revolution and in a way didn't think about it as being abnormal. There'd be plenty of times the city got occupied twice by troops. And Mario Savio, it's really interesting to me because he gave this great speech on top of a car in the middle of Sproul Plaza. There are times when the machine is so odious that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part. And you have to throw yourself upon the gears and levers of the machine and make it stop. And that was a speech about stopping universities from preventing students from having free speech. Because ironically, what started it all where there's Some kids that in Sproul Plaza, kind of the central meeting place there was then and is now, I think just every university has it, a college tabling, as they call it there, and still do, where you put up your little table. And in those days, Berkeley was not a liberal city that became more liberal. It was a conservative city that became radical in about a year, with the confluence of all these lefty professors from back east, ideas kind of just beginning to brew in the youth movement in San Francisco, so close by. And anyways, these kids, perfectly kind of square kids, wanted to have a table for the Democratic Party club. You know, everybody was 18, they couldn't vote for three more years, so they figured this is the time to talk to them about being Democrats. And the university paternalistically said, you can't do that. We don't allow you to do political speech on campus. And the students said, but this is a public university, and we're 18, so we're free. And the Constitution doesn't stop at the college gates, doesn't stop anywhere in America. And so we have rights to say what we wanna say. We have rights to explain what the Democratic Party is. And it went from there. And there was this huge explosion, a youth explosion, starting really in Berkeley. Went to Columbia, went to Michigan. But Berkeley was where it really started of students. And they don't come from lefty radical homes from around the country in sophisticated places. These were California kids who had grown up with the California dream, so to speak, and, you know, the beautiful suburbs and the beaches and all that. And they said, we don't want that. We don't want that if we can't have free speech. And they eventually took over Sproul hall, which is the big administration building. And they were there for, I think, 42, maybe more hours than that. And one of the interesting things that I try to tell young people is one of the things that went on in Sprowl hall was somebody got some gay pornography, a film. It was hard to get straight pornography in the early 1960s, but since San Francisco was there, probably helped them. And they showed it in the basement of Sproul hall, which today's college student. I can't even understand why that was a transgressive thing, but they were saying, and it wasn't just for gay kids, I'm sure probably is a gay kid who got it organized, but saying, you know, if you don't want to watch it, go to a different room. But, you know, it's okay to be gay and to be sexual and To. I think they also kind of did it because it was the most shocking thing they could imagine. And anyways, they threw their levers upon the gears of the machine of the university and changed not just the university, but the country. And I hear all these kids now who are much quieter than the loud kind of. I don't even call them social justice kids. I don't know what I call them, but whatever the term is, backed by many professors, but there are so many kids saying, this is terrible. I hate this. I disagree. And it's going to take the courage of those Cal kids to throw themselves upon the gears and levers of the machine and say, I can't stand it anymore. The machine has become too odious. Mario famously said that there's time when you say, I can't take part. I can't even passively take part. And so there are a lot of kids who are sort of in the position of which I understand. And I would probably be doing myself of just saying, I'll just passively take part. I need to get my degree, and then I'll get out of here. As much as I see those students in the 60s having caused a lot of problems that we have today, I also have tremendous respect. And when I hear people saying dismissively when someone's sort of critiquing what's going on on campus, they'll inevitably be some horrible writer in XYZ saying, oh, you're so stupid, or older this or that, because you actually think what happens in college is important. And it's like, excuse me, those kids in college stopped the Vietnam War. Those kids in college changed the constitution so that you could vote at age 18. Because they said, look, if you're going to send me to Southeast Asia, possibly to get killed, I want a chance to vote for the administration that's going to send me or not send me. So to say that the things that happen on college campuses aren't crucially important to the life of the country is an ignorant position. And we wouldn't want colleges that don't produce students and ideas that are going to change the life of the country. So that was all sort of my test tube of the good and the bad of the beginning of college students. Before then, you go back to the 20s, college students, you see those pictures like they're in their raccoon coats and the girls have their chrysanthemum corsages and they have their banners and they're going to the big game. And that lasted and really reasserted itself after the war really reasserted it after the 50s. These kids could have had a really comfortable, sweet life going to a free beautiful university across the glittering bay from San Francisco. And they said, no, we are going to throw ourselves on the gears and levers of the machine because we are, are Americans and we have the right to free speech. That's how the free speech movement started.
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Yeah, I'm just. Two readings of a free speech movement, right? One is that everybody's hypocritical and when you're out of power, you want free speech, and when you're in power, you have to shut it down. The other is that there was a genuine principle at stake there and that for very deep and good reason, the left fought in the 60s that they needed to defend free speech. And in fact, some of the real veterans of that movement continue to speak for free speech. But I think one of the hard transformations, if you're trying to understand why it is that the left in the 60s was radically for free speech, and now, at least in the United States, free speech has nearly become to be seen as a conservative value, is about choosing the establishment. So in the 60s, it was clear that the establishment is conservative and that the kinds of ideas that would get shut down if the president of a university or the head of a big corporation made decisions were left wing ideas. And today we're in a sort of oddly schizophrenic state of mind about this. On the one hand, you know, the claim is that every institution in the country, from Princeton University to the big corporations to everything, are racist or white supremacists. And on the other hand, the people who make those claims actually want Twitter and Facebook, want Princeton University, want Berkeley's administration to be deciding about who gets to speak. So I think that's a sort of odd thing where actually the left now feels like it's culturally in power. And that at some level helps to explain why, even despite occasional claims, when really they're so oppositional, they feel, yeah, let's give all this power to authorities to make those decisions. All of this is. I'm a little puzzled, and I have a kind of theory, but I'm a little puzzled by how this transformation took place. I'd love to hear your view on why it is that the left today is anti free speech to such an extent. And what that's missing.
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Well, it's this whole idea of it being intolerable to hear other ideas, as I always say, about abortion. The reason the argument is pitched at a screaming level is that Both sides know. If you had to sit down and listen to the best argument of the other side, I don't think it would change your mind. I have a clear position on abortion. I don't think the other side's position, if articulated extremely well, would change my mind. But I have heard it articulated extremely well. And I can say that is a really strong position. But free speech, speech is working when you're miserable. You know, I was, Gosh, what was I, 12 or 13? Young listeners probably won't have heard of this, but, you know, the American Nazi Party got a permit to march in Skokie, Illinois. And Skokie didn't just have a very large Jewish population, a huge number of families there had been Holocaust survivors and had settled together there. And I just was outraged. I was outraged, as rightly you'd be outraged, at anything the Nazi party would do. And I rush home to tell my lefty dad, can you believe this? He's like, yes, Kate, I've heard of that. And I said, what do we do to stop it? He said, well, the ACLU is fighting to allow it to happen. And I had in my mind as the child, the ACLU is a great organization. They're on the side of good people. How could the ACLU be on the side of these bad people? But they're not on the side of bad people. A lot of Jewish people in the ACLU at that time and founded the aclu, they were large enough, not in their hearts, it's not a heart thing, because you have no heart for a Nazi, but large enough in understanding this principle that if they don't have the right to assemble and if they don't have the right to say their vile things, then other people won't have the right to talk about legal abortion or have a pro choice march in the same streets. And that the ACLU at that point and leftist America had enough faith in the American people that if the American people heard the arguments of Nazis, they would not be persuaded by them, they would be more disgusted by them.
- [15:51]
B
This is a really interesting aspect of what's going on at the moment, I think, and I hadn't quite thought about it in those terms until you put it this way. And it's that, yes, one line of claims against free speech is just words of violence. And when people say terrible things, the people who are hurt by them are affected as much by it as though you had slapped them. And so if I can't go and slap somebody, why am I allowed to say mean things to them? And that's one strand of a conversation intellectually, and I think it's important to respond to that. But there is also, I think, a second thing going on, which is a really deep lack of trust in the judgment and the decency of the average person. It's a complete rejection of any idea of a public sphere as a marketplace of ideas, which sometimes is put in overly simplistic ways. And that sort of caricature, that argument is when attacked, well, that's clearly not the case. But it goes deeper than that. It's that if you allow misinformation and disinformation, if you allow insults, if you allow extremists, then actually the average person might vote for somebody truly terrible. And so we can't trust our fellow citizens to be exposed to this stuff because fundamentally, we can't trust our fellow citizens. I understand where that is coming from in the first year after the Trump presidency. I get what drives that feeling. But it is a pretty profoundly anti Democratic sentiment because you can't really, really be a small Democrat and have such fundamental mistrust in the judgment of the average person.
- [17:29]
A
You know, five years ago, this is when I would give my great rousing speech for the average American and, you know, fanfare for the common man and all of that. But I'll tell you, my dad was a freshman in college when Pearl harbor was bombed. And everyone in Amherst College, they all walked into town and enlisted that Monday because it was bombed on a Sunday night and they enlisted the Monday. And I remember saying to my dad once, well, what did you do after that? And he looked at me, he said, went to class, like what you did? But anyways, so, yeah, life goes on. And just like if you're that generation, your dad was in the war, you don't even think about it, doesn't talk about it. And, you know, he has his life. And then Tom Broga comes out with the Greatest Generation. And these people who went and fought the war were the great, greatest generation. And I saw suddenly my father in a new light. And I was home visiting, and I said, dad, you don't realize, but you are part of the greatest generation. And he put his book down and he looked at me with great seriousness and he said, kate, if you had met any one of the enlisted men on my ship, you would never use that phrase again. Both of his ships were mostly Southerners. He said they were profoundly racist, profoundly ignorant. He didn't say as much, but he hinted at sort of souvenirs having maybe, you know, as parts of Bodies being taken and this sort of thing. And I've started to wonder as I look around myself, knowing that the only hope anywhere ever is in, you know, as horrible as it is, that these founders, they were slave owners and they recognized it in the Constitution. So it was built in. It was obviously an argument, but it was built in. But when that happened, the world was emperors, it was kings, it was tribal lords and chiefs. You know, the fact that even one small set of people, white men, what if we could all be equal? You know, that that was the revolution that changed the world. And maybe we got it started and we can't handle it anymore. But when I look around today and I see the number of people who believe in fantastical things, Qanon being an obvious example. I look around at that, and these people who believe these things, they seem beyond. They are beyond reason. But I'm starting to lose my faith as well in. In the ability on both sides. But the real movement here isn't against speech. It's against reason. The sleep of reason produces monsters. It's much bigger than we think it is. It's a kind of quasi religious movement. And I think that as Christianity has fallen away in America for obvious reasons and in the west, that was a system of beliefs that involved fantastical things. You know, my mother and my grandmother, my great grandmother told me that there was this man and he floated up, you know, out of that tomb, and one day he made water turn into wine. And one day he raised a dead man back to life. No evidence, no logic behind it, but a deeply seated set of beliefs. And as that's faded, I think people that maybe there's just a need in human beings to attach themselves to the fantastical and to maybe even mystical. Well, no. You go to the dinner parties and people tell the truth. You go to the dinner parties of the most respected American journalists and people tell the truth. But once the cameras are on, everybody reverts to this coded language of the fantasy. Chronic migraine. Fifteen or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a split spectator in my own life. Botox Anabotulinum toxin a prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment.
- [21:31]
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- [22:07]
B
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- [22:08]
A
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- [22:14]
B
There's two things in this very interesting to me that I'd love to double click on. I mean, the first is about sort of whether actually we live in a bigger world of fantasy now than in the past. One of the things that I find striking is that what I consider the most Serious polls about QAnon seem to show that about 10% of Americans believe in it in any kind of serious way. And you go back to 1999, mostly before social media, and you look at the Gallup poll, but about 10% of Americans at that time believed that, you know, the moon landing was fake. And you go back even further, and obviously people believe in the protocols of the elders of Zion and all kinds of other things. So I wonder whether there's something as new as we like to think about these fantasies.
- [22:58]
A
That's exactly my point. It's just the particular fantasies are new. There is a whole variety of fantasies about everything about this vaccination, that it could be full of microchips, or it could be a plot by the government, or it could be a Tuskegee type of racist movement. And all of these things that I do have to say. In the 1960s, again in a college, there was this great belief that America was a great country because we were this scientific leader and we could get a man on the moon. And you know, it's just so interesting when you just look at Kennedy at that inaugural speech. It looks like the 50s, because it was really still the 1950s. And all of a sudden, in this very short period of time, we put a man on the moon. And I remember my older sister was born in 56, and my mother, who was taking her to the doctor, was like one of the first years that the polio vaccination was available to kids. And my mother looked at her baby and almost had a tear in her eye thinking, ellen will never have polio because my mother had lived At a time where kids got polio and kids she knew were sent away in iron lungs. And school, obviously, with the Sputnik thing, you know, America made a decision. We really need to educate kids in science and math. And there was a belief in that. And now the belief on science and math is crumbling, is just crumbling. And that means logic and reason are crumbling. So I think you're right. I think we are in the process not of creating a new vision, we're in the process of reverting to a premodern vision.
- [24:39]
B
So you do think that there is a real difference. I guess the question is, is the difference at the level of how many people believe crazy things? Which it seems to me was probably the case 20 or 40 or 60 years ago as well, or sort of is it actually at the level, in a weird way of social deference? I mean, is it that the people who believed crazy things in the 60s didn't matter because they didn't have power and because they didn't have a way of organizing themselves and because actually, in the end, the government was able to get people to go along with what it decided? I don't know. Perhaps that's right. On the other hand, you had things like the John Bircher Society was pretty influential even at the time. And even when you look at the sort of intellectuals. I mean, I agree with you that actually, often, you know, what the guy at the gas station thinks is much more sensible than what somebody who recently got a postgrad degree from a fancy university thinks. But I wonder whether that was the case in the 50s, too. I mean, you had a lot of intellectuals who made really shameful excuses for Joseph Stalin and who aligned with Communist Party in the United States at the time that really was Stalinist and essentially directed by Russia. And the average guy at the gas station had those views, even though they probably wanted a bigger welfare state or a little bit more help from the state. And then the third level at which I wonder about that is when I go back to read George Orwell, for example, and I read about the shameful way in which intellectuals at the time weren't against free speech. That's really something of this moment. But refused to stand up for free speech. He has this wonderful passage about going to a meeting of Penn to celebrate freedom of speech. And everybody gives these very abstract speeches about it, but nobody actually acknowledges the very real ways in which freedom of speech was under threat of the time, including in the Soviet Union. And so, I don't know. I sort of. On the more depressing End tend to think that intellectuals are always screwed up, that there's always these sort of odd fads that everybody goes along with. But actually intellectual life is often incredibly homogeneous in the way that Orwell also describes very vividly, where everybody believes one thing in 19 and everybody believes the opposite in 1935, and everybody believes the opposite again in 1943. And that's deeply depressing about the state of human knowledge and thought and all of these things about the state of intellectuals, about moral character of intellectuals. But it also gives me a little bit of solace because we live in a moment of cowardice and we live in a moment of fantasy. But perhaps there's nothing that new.
- [27:13]
A
I really knew a lot of intellectuals growing up and a lot of great writers growing up. And although it was a mostly male still faculty, a lot of those guys had tremendous physical courage because they'd been in the war. And like my father, who was like a total asshole and loved like Walter Bader and never learned how to drive a car, he had incredible physical courage. And when the kids were getting tear gassed, he just left his office immediately and went down to be with the students as that was happening. And now what I find when I go to colleges, you'll go to the dinner party and these are professors with tenure saying, this is terrible what's going on on campus. Oh, well, what are you doing about it? Oh, you can't do anything about it because you'll get in trouble. And I thought, well, tenure was never supposed to be a free job for somebody with a diploma. It was supposed to secure your right to work and to do your research without ideological intrusion. But the other thing is when you go on campus, you just kind of wander around and there's like these write on speeches that are just so fatuous and just such repackaging of old ideas. Ask the kids what they're majoring in and count the number of kids who are majoring in organic chemistry. The kids who are doing the really hard stuff, stuff of science. And, you know, taking physics and engineering, it's not that they're more square, it's that they are involved with the physical world. They are involved with things where the search for truth is so obviously the point of the exercise that it's not even mentioned. And I think that it's the humanities that have become hollowed out. And I can't imagine how we're going to sustain these very expensive colleges when so many of these degrees are meaningless. You know, what they've been taught is meaningless and how Are you going to not believe some idea if you don't hear the other idea?
- [29:23]
B
I think I disagree with you on this point. And it's not about sort of a value of what students are being taught necessarily. It's about how financially and in other ways useful it is in the real world. Because at this point it seems to me that a certain kind of right on discourse has conquered so many institutions in society so quickly that, you know, taking these courses and being indoctrinated into a particular way of speaking is incredibly socially useful.
- [29:54]
A
Right?
- [29:55]
B
In fact, if you haven't taken any of these courses and you haven't been to any of those campuses, the risk of inadvertently without meaning to be political, without meaning to be controversial, saying the wrong thing and suffering very real consequences for that, including potentially losing a job, is very, very real. And so at the very least, you need to take a few of those courses in order to have a sense of how you maneuver through the social world without risk to your livelihood. And at its pinnacle, being very versed in that language buys you access to any number of very fancy jobs in the big foundations of the country, increasingly in some of the think tanks of the country, in hr, in big corporations, as diversity consultants in big corporations. And so actually, financially speaking, I think this is a perfectly reasonable bet.
- [30:44]
A
I'll single click on that. Which is that what happened was because these degrees in these fatuous subjects bought entry to such lower level jobs, they're fanned out into like lower government positions, federal government, teaching, different kinds of institutions at the bottom, like hr. Everyone will tell you they're kind of the dimmest people in any organization. There were so many of them and they began to bring their ideas slowly in through the levers of whatever corporate corporation that was. So they ended up having a lot of power. I don't know if it is a financial fast track to these opinions. You have to have the opinions and be au courant when you're talking to the head person. But I don't know if you need to even study them. And I don't know what becomes of a person. Back to Orwell politics of the English language. I don't know what becomes of a person when they start adopting language that they initially know in terminology isn't true. They know that a word is not an act of violence. And there's this great thing in the States right now, I'm just sitting back and watching this one with eagerness because there are two substantial groups of Americans who don't want to take and are not taking the vaccine. You have white evangelicals in huge numbers, and you have urban black Americans in significant percentages. So you've got the news media stuck because they really want to revile the white evangelicals, but they're very protective of the urban black experience and Tuskegee and what people might think. And so you just see reporters trying to tiptoe through a ideological landmine instead of just saying, you know, hey, two huge groups, they have a different reason. Let's talk to a scientist, how about that? And see what happens. So I think you're right. You could lose a job in a second. You know, the whole idea of that famous book, the Tenured Radical by Robert Kimball, right, where it's like, you know, the really radical kids of the 60s didn't go off and become college professors. You know, he went off and led the whether underground. And then they became college professors, but they had no interest in being part of a bureaucratic system. So who started taking over the universities were the dimmest radicals. They're radicals who espoused opinions that were radical but wanted to have their pension plan and their health care and their job for life and all that. So they weren't the ones who were birthing exciting new ideas. Those people were out in the real world.
- [33:30]
E
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- [34:00]
B
Somebody who taught me in college once told me a story which may very well be apocryphal, but I do have it firsthand from him that he was, you know, a young teaching fellow at an Oxford college. And one time Michel Foucault was visiting the college, and one evening after dinner, you know, the fellows retired to the senior combination room to, you know, drink port and smoke cigars or whatever. And you realize that the only two people who had signed up on that particular occasion was Michel Foucault and a very conservative, old stodgy English fellow. And so he was concerned that they would come to blows, so he ran to inform his friend who he was supposed to meet. This is before cell phones, of course, but unfortunately, he wasn't going to be able to come because these two important people are about to have a fist fight in the senior combination room. And he rushes back to it and he finds the two of them very happily sitting in a corner discussing their respective pension plans. Something I want to ask you about that may be a real change in this moment that feels very different for me today relative to when I arrived in the States, which was roughly in 2007, depending on how you count. But this feeling that you're at a dinner party and people say, well, of course, I would never say this publicly.
- [35:13]
A
The fact that.
- [35:14]
B
But even saying it at the dinner party is a minor act of courage that people say your positions, which by the way, are not in any way objectionable and that are often left of center or, well, left of center, but in some way, sometimes obvious, sometimes obscure, go against the many different orthodoxies and taboos we have at this moment in sort of respectable political space. And the way in which I've become completely accustomed to. To people saying, oh, let's not talk about that here, or let's talk about that less loudly, or let's take a
- [35:46]
A
couple of steps in that change of subject.
- [35:48]
B
Yes, going to talk about that. And something that right now in Europe, I really have not experienced in Europe at all. I mean, not once. And in the States, I feel like certain circles, it's become just such a normal thing. And so I guess I want to hear from you. I mean, have you ever felt that other than the last few years?
- [36:09]
A
Well, obviously before even I walked the earth in the 50s, during McCarthyism, I think that was a very common thing, that anything at a dinner party, you could even allude to something accidentally or that you'd read something was very dangerous thing to say at a dinner party.
- [36:28]
B
Since you mentioned McCarthyism, I want to say something which is probably going to make me unpopular and I'll probably get wrong, which is that McCarthyism is talked about today as though the people it targeted had all been wonderful, upstanding people with the most noble of political ideals that nobody could reasonably have in any way been concerned about. And I think that makes it easy to then say it's fine to fire people for their opinions, it's fine to shut down free speech as long as the people you're targeting are in fact bad people rather than good people as they were under McCarthy. Now, undoubtedly many people who were very decent and very idealistic were targeted by McCarthy ISM. Undoubtedly many people were targeted who didn't even have the views that were supposedly culpable and were simply falsely associated or accused. But it is also true that actually a lot of the people who were accused and who lost their jobs were 100% straight down the line, Stalinists, at a time in which there were, you know, tens of thousands of people languishing gulags in misogyny, you know, a time in which Stalin had already made a pact with Hitler many years earlier and been responsible for huge purges of people. Right. So I think you can only express the true horror of McCarthyism if you hold the position that it is wrong to fire people from being screenwriters in Hollywood or teachers in schools, even if they have beliefs that actually were horrendous. And that, I think, then commits you to a very different set of ideas about this moment.
- [38:13]
A
Well, I agree fully that it's been wildly exaggerated, the number of just valorous people who lost their jobs. And even to this day, in Hollywood, where I live, the Hollywood blacklist, you would think it was like 10,000 screenwriters or something who lost their job. There was like 22 of them, you know, who lost their job. It was a very small, small group of people. And by the way, screenwriters. Screenwriters are always getting thrown off movies. Oh, it wasn't my crappy screenplay. They thought I was a communist. But I always say, are their ideas so vile that they shouldn't even be discussed in any way that might attract people to them? In New York, there was a little boy named Etan Patz. It was very, very, very famous case. I think it was 1980. A little boy in New York was walking to school and was never seen again. He was about 6 or 7. And they actually found his body, actually recently remains. But it was determined by everyone that a child molester, which indeed turned out to be true, had violated him and killed him. And then there became known this niche group, nambla, if you've ever heard of it, the national association of Man Boy Love Association. And they suddenly were being interviewed and being seen to be much larger than I'm sure they were. But there was this revulsion, this revulsion that they should be in existence, which most sort of decent people hadn't even known. And that I think it was kind of a tipping point in the country of, like, wait a minute, there are some ideas that simply shouldn't be aired or simply shouldn't be be allowed to be stated or espoused in any way. And I think that would be the ultimate of those ideas. And so there are plenty of things. Like my editor, whom I really respect, Jeff Goldberg, he's a free speech absolutist. And I said to him, once we were to college, I think we were on stage, and I said, well, what if somebody was denying the Holocaust? Would you give them free speech rights on campus? And he said, of course I would. And I was like, wow, you're hardcore, Jeff. I'm weaker than that. You know, there are ideas that I would want to shut down. And so that's where I really waffle. And that's where kind of the middle ground where I kind of understand at least the impetus of people wanting to shut down ideas.
- [40:34]
B
I understand that instinct completely. And I sympathize with people who say, you know, why should we tolerate these horrible things in our public space?
- [40:45]
C
Fear.
- [40:46]
B
For me, the right argument for free speech or most powerful argument for free speech is not that all of it is valuable or that it will, you know, even some of the idealistic arguments of John Stuart Mill, but I think make an important point of contribution but aren't definitive because, you know, in the end, is it really true that this allows us to see the truth and that it makes us hold our positions more vividly? In some circumstances, yes, but perhaps not in all of them. But for me, the ultimate argument is simply, is there an institution that we can trust to make those determinations for us, and can we trust that institution not to start to abuse its powers? And do we want to raise the stakes of politics so high that the next election doesn't just decide who governs, but also who gets to speak? And those, to me, are actually the deepest reasons why we have to tolerate free speech, including speech that for good reason we find to be deeply upsetting and offensive. Because the alternative is a bureaucratic regime that we just shouldn't trust. And that goes back, I think, to this idea of the fact that so many students on campus today say we want the administration to shut these things down shows odd way that they have an incredible amount of trust in the administrations that at other points we might criticize. But there's something odd about that. This is the fundamental difference between now and the 60s, which is that the establishment is seen as and probably is left wing rather than conservative.
- [42:11]
A
Yes, that was always in Berkeley when I was just a kid. My father, everyone the admit I didn't even know what it meant. The administration, like, oh, it's the administration. They're so terrible. And in those days it was a very small group, typically of typically quite conservative people, as you have to be, I'm sure, to run the hall financial or whatever of a college or university. And now it's these huge mechanisms of dullards and careerists and some very good people. But I have to always remember, I do remember. It's easy for me to say you should stand up against this. But if you have a partner and a child and a mortgage and maybe an elderly parent who's needing a financial support at assisted living, to give up your livelihood and to be so stained.
- [43:01]
B
I have another question about cowardice in that context. I was at a conference in France recently which was full of anti woke people without really being very many woke people either at the conference or so far as I can tell in France. And I was a little taken aback by it. And I have my criticisms of certain forms of French universalism and laicite and I had disagreements with people at that conference that ran quite deep. But. But I was struck by the fact that the French elite really still believes in something. I mean, the idea of La Republique and the principles of it. Laicite goes deep. And these are people who are willing to risk things for those principles. They are willing to fight for them. And it struck me by contrast that there's really nothing that the American elite seems to believe. The sort of counter elite or the rising elite, the quote unquote woke. They believe in something and they don't usually pay a price for fighting for it, but they may even be willing to do so. But the reason why a relatively small number of people with sometimes quite extreme and sometimes in my opinion, quite unconvincing views is able to hold such tremendous political and cultural influence is that they are the only ones who believe anything. And then there's the elite that doesn't believe anything. And then there's people on the far right who also believe in stuff. And I wonder whether that helps to explain the cultural and political predicament of the United States in this weird period.
- [44:31]
A
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And I think the idea when we talk about, you know, terrorism, Middle Eastern terrorism, when it comes to maybe a religious ideology, we don't have anybody that believes in God that way, that this world is really a temporary and non existent place and it's the world beyond that we're fighting for. I was just writing something's coming out next week on the day of 9 11. And like everyone else, I was so unstrung by it. I didn't understand it. Everybody instantly knew it was Al Qaeda. I didn't know what they were, whatever, but I never in my life, I mean, I'd grown up America's an imperialist power. My parents would take us to Europe a lot of times during the Vietnam War. They couldn't stand to be here during the war. And American, the common man, was just some sort of unlettered person. But when that day happened and then everything else happened to change it. But I thought, what am I going to do? I mean, I was in Los Angeles, very small children. It was kind of like the John F. Kennedy speech actually meant something like, what am I going to do for my country? I never thought ever of America as anything except this all powerful, invulnerable, monolithic thing that I just took completely for granted. And I said, what the hell can I do? And I remembered that July 4th that year, some real estate company had put these little American flags on everyone's lawn, I guess, to drum up business. Obviously, they were like a foot high with little plastic flags. And I remember I had stuck them in the garage because I thought, maybe the kids will want to play with them in the sandbox or something. That's how much respect I had for the flag, that it was like, oh, be a fun toy. And I remember going through the house and finding them and planting them in the front of my yard and having, for the only time in my entire life, this feeling of, I'm an American and I love this country and I stand for this country. And I just felt tears come when I did that. And it was, as I say, it was the only time in my life that I ever thought, this is a good place, and this is a great place. All I'd ever thought about was, you know, you grew up the way I did. Oh, the school of America is teaching torture. And, you know, in Central America, all these terrible, terrible things America had done. When everybody always says, like, you know, the history of America you got in school was wrong, I'm like, you know, the history of America I got in school is that we were just an imperialist colonialist. This and that, which is also true. But it's also true that when we fall apart in the next couple of decades, our descendants can at least say, I came from the country that invented freedom as we know it. And I think whoever went first would be the first to fall. Because whoever went first in creating this thing of freedom and equality was historically bound to make huge, hideous mistakes. In America, slavery was just because they weren't coming out of the modern world, they were creating it. And so I think the first country that created it would have baked in so many hideous mistakes that they would fall. And I think we're gonna fall, but the rest of the west needs to stand up and America needs to be remembered as the place that this is where it happened.
- [47:53]
B
That's inspiring. Terrifying in equal measure. I mean, I guess I don't know
- [47:58]
A
what it would mean if I were on match.com that would probably be my review. Caitlin,
- [48:06]
B
what would it mean for the United States to fail? I just finished a book, thinking through diversity and democracy. And America can fail as a diverse democracy. It can't really fail as a diverse society. Or if it does, that means the death of 100 million people. It means ethnic cleansing or civil war or something that will be on a par with the worst horrors of American history. And so you could imagine the democracy failing and a dictator taking charge. You know, either Trumpist dictator who sort of turns part of the population to second or third class citizens, or perhaps a dictator kind of like Tito who in some kind of way holds the society together by subjugating them all and somehow dealing with the tensions between different groups in that kind of way. But it's really not clear to me what it would mean for the United States to fail in that way. And so we sort of condemned to try and make this great experiment in self government work because it really isn't obvious what the path towards failure would be. You know, the path towards failure in the early 19th century was much easier. Right. I mean, what happens to a republic when it fails? Well, it reverts into some kind of monarchy.
- [49:18]
A
Right, right.
- [49:18]
B
And it's obvious what that would have looked like. And that was, you know, for good reason, with fear. But if the founding Fathers had, there'd have to be some kind of fight between factions and one person would win and they would turn themselves into monarch for life. And then it would probably turn to a hereditary monarchy and boom. That's what happened to Florence in the Middle Ages. And there was every reason to fear that it would happen to the American republic in the late 18th century. But I think in terms of we are such a diverse continent, ideologically, politically, geographically, and also obviously in religious and ethnic terms, we're condemned to make it work because at that level it's just not obvious, whatever option there is.
- [49:57]
A
Well, you know, I always look this up to remind myself, can this be true? And it is true. I think we're the most racially and ethnically diverse country in the world. Is that true? I think that is true. We're one of them anyway. So the idea that it's not working is inaccurate. It is incredibly working. Look at other societies in the world, cultures in the world, where there's maybe just two different groups. It's just if you look in California, where I've spent my life, left for education, things like that, but born and raised here, the decay. Los Angeles is a wasteland almost San Francisco. Everybody's like, oh, San Francisco, it's never been like this. San Francisco was really rough in the 70s. There was a lot of crime in San Francisco in 70s, but it wasn't in collapse. And things are just on every level. The notion, you know, the head of the teachers union said just two weeks ago in Los Angeles magazine, the LA teachers union said students haven't lost any education, having a year out of school now they know the difference between a protest and a riot and that makes up for it. And unbelievable numbers of kids didn't go to school at all last year at all. And the head of the teachers union is saying that that's fine. And we have allowed violent crime, murder rate to just soar because everybody's very afraid about policing and of being on the wrong political side of policing. But more than that, it's a deep, I don't know we'll end on this because it's really bleak. But I just see a deep cultural decay in which all that school kids are suddenly understanding at all about America is the horror of slavery, which is absolutely true. And people are saying students in America know the wrong things about the American Revolution. Kids in America don't know shit about anything. If you ask that, they don't know. Like I'd like to talk to you about the 17th century in Jamestown. They don't know what the 17th century is. They don't know where the countries of the world were. They don't know anything. The ignorance is pervasive. And I think there's just going to be this continued collapse and it'll be people with extreme wealth will have extreme might and the people now who have nothing will have less than nothing. And something will come along to sort of be a third rate version or a fourth rate version of what we once thought we were.
- [52:38]
B
You spent part of your 20s, I believe, teaching in some of the fancier private schools in the United States.
- [52:46]
A
Yeah, into my early 30s. Yeah.
- [52:48]
B
And you've written really impressively about what's wrong with these schools today. You know, what is it that we're doing wrong in education, including the education of not the poor kids in LA who are not getting any education at all, and the head of teachers unions making light of a learning loss, but also in the most Privileged schools in la but continue to meet right through Covid. Why is it that our educational system is not forming people for courage as well as the recognition of what's bad in this country? And how can we do better than that?
- [53:21]
A
Well, for education of I would say not just the poor, but I would say, you know, the working class and even the lower middle class teachers and the teachers unions get attacked so often. I just did it. But these teachers are trying to go to work every day in the face of children being raised at a time of family collapse and civic collapse. And so the idea, you know, when I taught in private school, there was no discipline issue. I mean, I would say it was the most ideal student body. It was largely Jewish and largely Korean. And you can't find two traditions that have more respect for education. And teaching English with Jewish kids is phenomenal because they've come from this tradition of the text. The text, the text. And so when you say, you know, you guys read five chapters, we're going to look at this sentence, they're like, yeah, I get it, I get it. That makes sense to me more than anything. Although most of them had a lot of money, what they had were stable families who believed in education and who thought that education was the most important thing in the children's life besides their health. And so, you know, there are public schools in California now where there's social services in there, there's Planned Parenthood in there, there's childcare, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And it's like, okay, that makes sense. So you're a resource center. Are you teaching them anything? Like, where does teaching come in on that? The schools have largely become social services. And so whenever I hear of a kid who just does well at one of these schools, I say, that's a phenomenal person. Because it shouldn't be up to the student to have to fight to stay on the right path. Everything in school, even if the home life is bad, everything in school should be to get on the right path and to keep encouraging and keep pushing back on. As for the wealthy, these private schools, I will tell you, they are a superb education. Believe me, when those kids come to the top private schools and they want to be doctors, they go to Princeton. And here's what happens. They are way ahead of the basic classes, and they probably right into the sophomore classes. And really talented kids from public schools, oftentimes minority kids who didn't even have that option of that level of education would have risen to the same level totally had they had that kind of school option, but didn't have it, they start falling away. But the bottom line is these private school kids are very well educated. And I think that their politics are opposed right now. And I think that they're opposed for the teachers as well, because it's great to say. This is kind of sickening to be making like, oh, my. I started so long ago. I was making $25,000 in teaching the children of billionaires. And it's like, I'm the authority figure, but I'm like, am I going to make rent this month? And it's kind of great to lecture and hector them on how horrible wealth is. And then they're like, yeah, wealth is horrible. And they go home and they read Das Kapital beside the pool. And that's how rich you have to be to make socialism work for you. You have to have a billionaire father. And then you're like, yeah, man, the people.
- [56:33]
B
The man is terrible and he's my father.
- [56:36]
A
Exactly, exactly. But here's the difference, Yasha. In the 60s, those kids did break with their parents. That was the whole heartbreak of the 60s parent. I don't know her anymore. What happened to her? She won't come home. These kids, they're wise. They're like, hey, my dad's rich. I'm not going anywhere. I'll dress up with some opinions and I'll maybe work somewhere with some goofy philosophy or maybe some very good noble thing, but my dad's super wealthy and I'm going to inherit that money. And we're just. The biggest difference between the America I grew up in as a young person and the America young people grow in today is in the 60s, there was a huge middle class, and it wasn't just a white middle class. Here in la, in the southern part of la, which was in a largely black area, there were five factories with incredible union jobs. I mean, real union jobs where you don't need both parents to work, where you have health insurance, where you have a vacation, where you have that. And up through the early 90s, you could kind of like a little bit get into the wrong side of things and maybe be a young man in la and then you could settle down and get a real job. And there are no jobs, that there's no middle class. It's just so hollowed out. It's almost as though I'm on the same class level as the billionaires because I have health insurance, you know, and I have a house that I pay a mortgage on. And then there's this other level. So I don't know. That's the gloom report from Caitlin in la.
- [58:21]
B
Well, I think you didn't just give us gloom, you also gave us lots of hope and insight and management. Caitlin, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
- [58:29]
A
Thank you. Thanks for having me. It was an honor to be asked and to be on.
- [58:35]
B
Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [59:02]
A
this recording carries a
- [59:03]
E
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- [59:07]
B
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C
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