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Episode 505: Owning the (Post) Libs · Words & Numbers

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Next on words and numbers. Higher education.
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The fallout from AI, higher education and post liberalism.
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Hi, I'm James. And I'm Anthony.
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And this is words and numbers. I remind our listeners that
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everything we discuss here reflects our opinions and not
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those of our employers. I remind everyone who is
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listening that my opinion should reflect your opinion.
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Well, your opinion should reflect my opinions.
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I guess would be the only way to to to put that.
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Reason your opinion should reflect my opinion.
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Is that what you said? Your opinion should reflect my
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opinion. That's what I said.
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Yeah. So that everybody's opinion
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should I should just be? Your opinion can respond of.
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Opinions. Everybody should just come up
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and bask in the reflection that I'm sending out.
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But. But anyway, this gets us around
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the tawdry problem of saying what's new and exciting in your
1:04
world this weekend. Well, one of our listeners send
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an article. This comes from Joanne Scherino,
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and I apologize if I've mispronounced.
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Joanne sends an article from your neck of the wood, James.
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Yeah, except. Except stop it because you, you
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just, you just stop it right now and I'm going to move on for a
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second. And yeah, you're not allowed to
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talk anymore. No more talking.
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I'm not done no more talking. Oh, oh, you're done.
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And you have. Things to say about AI.
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Well, then you could say him in a minute.
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All right, until then, I I've got this great story was running
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the Washington Post and it come come to find out if you are
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enterprising enough and clever enough, you can rail your way
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through a bachelor's degree in a matter literally of weeks.
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Yeah, You know, I've seen references to that, and I saw
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somebody say, oh, you can get a PhD in a year.
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I'm thinking, Oh no, I don't know what you're selling, but
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that's not a PhD. Oh well, you can.
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I mean, some institution will grant you something that they
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call a PhD, but when people tell me they're APHD now I have to
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stop. And I say, are you a real one or
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one of them online ones? There's a difference.
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And then I need to see your dissertation so I can figure out
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if you're telling me a bunch of lies or not, like Doctor Jill
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Biden. Liar, filthy liar.
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If anybody calls her doctor in any seriousness, you ought to
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have your head exam. But she is in She's.
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In EDD. I believe she is an EGD.
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But I I did myself the disservice of reading her
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dissertation. And it's so bad that I should
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find a way to make it available to everyone.
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I mean, it's just atrocious. But there there is this one
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woman, her name is Christine Williams, finished her
3:12
bachelor's in three months. Yeah, I saw a.
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Reference and it's his. That.
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It's a story straight out of the Washington Post, right?
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You can if you look for Christine Williams, and she was
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from North Carolina and went on in a couple of more months to
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get a master's degree. No big.
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Deal. But if it's the article that I'm
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thinking of, it was at least the thrust of the article was not
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that this was a diploma mill, but rather they simply gave her
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tests that someone with that level of knowledge should be
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able to pass and she passed them.
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Therefore, go with God. She figured out how to negotiate
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the process and she watched a bunch of apparently there is
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some way to watch online tutorials and get credit for
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them and things like this. And now she is helping other
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people negotiate these waters. And I've got two thoughts on it.
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On the one hand, if you're looking for a credential and you
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can get one very, very quickly at a low cost, well, I guess
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you'd be crazy not to. If you're looking for a, what we
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would typically call a college education, you can't get it in
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three months. You just can't.
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So these are two completely different things.
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You can call them both products if you want, but they're not the
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same. And I guess only you could know
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which of the two you're truly interested in.
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And I cast no aspersions one way or the other.
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But when colleges have made the cost of an education so very,
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very high, you could expect people to figure out sooner or
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later how to gain the system. And these people, the colleges,
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I mean, have allowed their systems to be gained by offering
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online classes in the 1st place. And this woman was taking up to
5:05
11 at a time. Yeah.
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Because let's face it, they're not terribly difficult.
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Which, Anthony, brings us to the foolishness of the week, which
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is what you wanted to talk. Oh, is this what you weren't
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going to use? It as the foolishness, yes.
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So now we can talk about it for for twice as long if you like,
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and for this in my neck of the woods, so so.
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Joanne Shirino sends this this article on AI Arizona State
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University. Apparently the professors there
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and I gather from reading the article that the professors were
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filming their classes for their own use.
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The university gets hold of these videos and chops them up
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into. Sports.
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This was the thing when I was at the University of Arizona, they
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they were forever trying to get me to go into that a little
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recording studio, real high end stuff.
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And they wanted me to record lectures, which would then
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immediately become the property of the University of Arizona.
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And the minute I heard that, I'm like, I'm out, you know, we're
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done here. But other other people were only
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too thrilled to do that. That way they could upload their
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lectures and only give them once and have their their course
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online and all of this. But, you know, leave it to
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college administrators, the little deanlets that run around
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loose on college campuses. Leave it to them to figure out
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how to make a mockery of higher education.
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Yeah, So they take these videos, cut them up into shorts, and now
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they're professors complaining that they're the the short is
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taken out of context. And I can picture easily, I've,
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I've given plenty of lectures in which I describe a counter a, a
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counter argument to the point that I'm trying to make.
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And if you were to take the video and cut out just that
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counter argument, it would look like I'm promoting all kinds of
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nonsense that is completely antithetical to the thing I'm
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teaching. But that's never going to happen
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here, aunt, for for a reason that that you just kind of
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glossed right over. You missed the industry buzzword
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AI is. AI is doing it, Yeah, yeah.
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So therefore it can never be incorrect or mistaken.
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So the AI is making things really short so people with tiny
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little attention spans can digest it.
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But then the AI is also creating I, I guess, little tiny printed
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versions of the lectures, right? That you can get a transcript if
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if you must. How is this not the most
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ridiculous thing in the world? Yeah.
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Who came up with this? Who said, you know what we
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should do? We should take every word out of
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a professor's mouth and reduce it to the three essential
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minutes. Right.
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Yeah, I've, I've got all kinds of problems with this.
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Probably first and foremost that you touched on is that they did
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this without the professor's consent.
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That, well, they don't have to have the professor's consent and
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I, I, I don't, I never dealt with Arizona State, so I don't
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know. I'm assuming the rules for them
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are exactly the same as they were for me at EU of A.
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This is all progressed I made before video became a thing.
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I made probably 200 videos of various lectures and then
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shortened things like 5 minutes on particular topics, and it was
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early enough that it wasn't even on the university's radar.
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It didn't occur to them that these videos would exist, let
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alone that they would have some entitlement to them.
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Aunt, I had to have a serious conversation with some stuffed
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shirt at EU of A about who owned the words I wrote into an online
9:19
learning system. In his opinion, it was it was up
9:23
in the air. So you can you can rest knowing
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that if you made a video and uploaded it, they're going to
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think it's theirs. And if they think it's theirs,
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they could do anything they want with it.
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Sooner or later, you know what they're going to do.
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They're going to take the AI version of these professors and
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fire the. Professors, right?
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Exactly. They'll take the AI version and
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then just link it to a textbook and tell the AI we're doing
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lectures. Yeah.
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We're done here, Yeah. And you know, on the one hand,
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this is nonsense of the highest order and they should not get
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the hell off. On the other, this kind of crap
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is going to bring my preferred form of education back into
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vogue, right? And sooner, sooner or later, a
10:12
lot of little tiny places are going to offer seminar only
10:17
learning. And it's going to be fantastic.
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I, I won't live to see it, right?
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I mean, it's, it's not going to happen in the next 10 years, but
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it it will come about as a result of this kind of nonsense,
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this just lunacy. I'm, I'm looking forward to the
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complete tearing down and rebuilding of higher education
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in this country. Yeah, it, it has.
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It was, it was headed toward the farcical for a long time.
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And I think, I think it arrived a few years ago.
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Don't you remember when the university was going to be
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replaced and and utterly changed by Moocs?
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Massive online, massive Open online courses, right?
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I wrote a MOOC. I've gotten that.
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So you did. Yeah, Yeah.
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Yeah, it took forever, but what a what a pain in the ass.
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And and then, you know, it's it, this is going to replace the
11:13
university that's going to replace the university.
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What's going to replace the university is an actual form of
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a center of learning. Right.
11:25
And the university isn't going to be replaced so much as it's
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going to put itself out of business.
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Yeah, and this comes back to your your dichotomy between
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education and credential. Yet you can.
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You can find all kinds of shortcut ways to generate
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credentials. I mean, heck, you and I both
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have PhDs. We could come up with some new
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form of credential that's above a PhD, and if you listeners
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would send us $5000 each, we will happily sign our names to
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it and you'd be a super PhD. That's all it.
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Takes for the credential. The education, on the other
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hand, takes a tremendous amount of sweat and time and effort.
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Yeah, that's that's right. And, and there are even some
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instances of, of people having a combination of both.
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It's not necessarily either or right and, and, and all points
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in between. And I'm literally not
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besmirching 1 and upholding the other.
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Sometimes you need a credential. I'm I'm OK with that.
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I mean, that's where we live in. Sometimes you want to have four
12:31
years of leisure where you can put your feet up and really
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learn well. Some people can't afford to do
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that. Some people can't afford to wait
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for years to get a credential. I get that.
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I don't want to. I don't want to hamstring them
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at all. But the universities are going
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to put themselves out of business.
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And that, my friend, will be the happiest outcome I can imagine.
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This week, Phil Magnus joins us. Phil is an economic historian
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and David J Thoreau Chair at the Independent Institute.
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Phil, welcome back to Words and Numbers.
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Happy to be here. Phil, it's been half a minute
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since you've been on. Lots of things have gone on in
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the world. Many things have changed.
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But we wanted to have you on specifically to talk about the
13:20
nation of Hungary, which frankly doesn't get a lot of airplay
13:26
here in the US for all kinds of perfectly understandable
13:30
reasons. But there, there there are some
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things that happened in Hungary. I guess what was it as we
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discuss it today, couple of weeks ago that that have a
13:41
ripple effect that will find its way onto our shores.
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So however you want to get started, you know, maybe let's
13:51
hang back on that for a minute or two and just tell us about
13:55
Viktor Orban first. Right.
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So Viktor Orban was the long term Prime Minister of Hungary.
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He had been in power for about 16 years, and this was actually
14:06
his second turn, second go round as Prime Minister 'cause he had
14:09
also been in that role in the late 1990s for a stint as a big
14:15
fixture in Hungarian politics. He really burst onto the scene
14:18
like right at the fall of the Soviet Union as kind of a
14:21
student leader against the communists.
14:24
And during his first term, he was, I'd say, like most typical
14:29
people on the European, Eastern European riot, he was anti
14:32
communist. But in his second term, he's
14:35
moved in some very peculiar directions that have mostly been
14:38
characterized by the consolidation of power.
14:42
So when he came back into office in 2010, he started making moves
14:45
against some of his opposition, keeping them out of the
14:48
state-run. Media notice state-run became
14:51
increasingly the theme, taking public ownership of corporations
14:56
and using state assets as political leverage.
15:00
So really, by the end of his second term, which he just got
15:06
voted out of office by a pretty resounding margin, he was
15:09
styling himself as a figure of ill liberal democracy or post
15:14
liberalism. Well, it was curious too, wasn't
15:17
it, Phil? Because given where he started,
15:20
he sure did cozy up to Putin in very strange ways.
15:24
It is, and that's one that we're trying to figure out.
15:27
You know, I think probably the cynical side of it is, is
15:30
there's money involved. Hungary is a major consumer of
15:35
energy resources coming from Russia.
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Actually, they got carve outs from the Trump administration
15:41
from the sanctions on Russia. And we can get into the story of
15:43
how that happened. But he he had a very close
15:47
foreign policy relationship. So one of the scandals right
15:50
before his election in this kind of say, it sunk his entire
15:53
party. His foreign minister, it was
15:56
revealed through some tapes, had been like ducking out of
16:00
European Commission foreign policy meetings and going off
16:04
and calling the Russians and reporting, well, hey, this is
16:06
what they just did. And you know, that's that's kind
16:09
of a no, no in the yeah, that's not Syria.
16:12
And and perhaps you could explain geographically where
16:16
Hungary sits relative to the Russians.
16:19
Yeah, so Hungary is in kind of the central part of Eastern
16:23
Europe. Most people know we're being in
16:25
Austria as you go east from there.
16:27
It's on the Danube River, you know, it's surrounded by.
16:32
So it butts up against Slovakia, butts up against Ukraine, which
16:37
is. There, there's one of the other,
16:39
and therein lies the problem. Therein, therein lies the
16:43
problem. So if if Ukraine were to.
16:46
Fall Hungary is is kind of next in the line.
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Who knows what happens, right? In a really weird move, so Orban
16:55
knew he was losing in the polls going into this election and he
17:00
tried to stir up like this conspiracy theory style
17:04
campaign, almost like manufacturing a conflict with
17:08
Zelensky in Ukraine, claiming that Zelensky was trying to
17:12
sabotage Hungary in some way or another.
17:14
And it can never really specify how, but they're all these weird
17:17
things that started happening. Like they intercepted a bank
17:20
shipment from Austria to Ukraine and claimed that it was money
17:24
laundering. And then a week later or so,
17:25
they claimed to have uncovered a, a plot to blow up a pipeline
17:30
going into Hungary and just all these really weird suspicious
17:33
things. But Slitsky was singled out as
17:36
as if he was the enemy and the the nefarious force behind all
17:39
of this. And the Ukrainians are kind of
17:41
like, what What are you doing? So it really don't make much
17:44
sense. That there was a point where,
17:47
you know, I, I would look at Orban and I would think he's
17:51
about as unlikely to lose an election as Erdogan in Turkey,
17:56
right? That he's just going to be there
17:59
for a very, very long time and we all better get used to it.
18:02
And yet he lost this election so badly that there were no
18:07
shenanigans. He just got up, conceited and
18:10
went home. Well, they were talking like
18:13
some of the videos before the polling place.
18:16
He was showing up and doing his campaign rallies and he was
18:19
getting booed and the Hungarians were shouting Russians go home
18:22
at him and it and it looked kind of like a you remember Nikolaj
18:26
Kochesku and Romania that. Christmas one year, Yeah, and
18:30
Christmas. Under the balcony expecting like
18:33
they're going to be cheering for him and they start booing him
18:35
and then his face. But you can see that on Orban's
18:38
face at some of these final stretch campaign rallies.
18:43
And yet and what happened, it's it's always a resounding defeat.
18:46
He got a super majority against him.
18:49
And it that wasn't supposed to happen because one of the things
18:52
he did, he played redistricting shenanigans.
18:54
He tried to gerrymander a big part of the the way that the
18:59
Hungarian parliament was elected because it's a dual system.
19:02
There are districts and then there's a proportional
19:04
nationwide based on the party vote.
19:07
And he tried to gerrymander the district part so that they
19:09
favored rural boats over the city 'cause he's not popular in
19:12
Budapest but he was popular in the rural areas.
19:15
And then he ends up winning like 5 of them out of the however
19:19
many dozens. This this election did not work
19:22
out at all for him. His party is relegated to an ash
19:26
heap at this point. The but, But you know Phil, why
19:32
on earth do we care? Well, if you remember, a couple
19:35
days before the election, a fellow by the name of JD Vance
19:39
flew over to Budapest. I I do remember it seemed odd to
19:43
me that a vice president, a sitting vice president, would be
19:47
actively campaigning for somebody in the 1st place and
19:52
then actively campaigning for somebody who I, I widely regard
19:56
as a despot. Right, right and in a very minor
20:00
player on the world scene, a little Eastern European country,
20:04
not very big in population it's got one of the weakest economies
20:07
in Europe and here's JD Vance showing up not just to talk to
20:11
the leader but to do campaign rallying they.
20:14
Literally honest with Donald Trump on the cell phone.
20:18
Held up to the microphone, yes. And and he and it was a
20:22
succession of these events. We just the big public rally
20:25
with Orban and then he goes around all these little
20:27
campaigns. So he was on the stump for a
20:30
foreign leader and and people like, why is the vice president
20:33
of the United States doing this? Well, it turns out there's more
20:36
to the story. And that's where things get
20:40
really interesting because JD Vance.
20:42
And they do get really, Oh yeah, really interesting.
20:45
Yeah, So JD Vance has a lot of political friends that predate
20:50
his Senate career. Even in this movement called
20:54
post liberalism, it's this kind of ideological thing that came
20:58
out of the right. But but before we go.
21:02
Before you go much further, yeah, tell us, what does post
21:04
liberalism mean? Yeah, well, a lot of people are
21:08
trying to figure that out. I think the the ungenerous way
21:12
to put it, these are people who think that modernity is an
21:16
abomination against nature and that the modern economy of the
21:19
world is too consumerist, and that actually the golden age of
21:23
world history was kind of a medieval Europe when the church
21:28
and the king placed everything in order.
21:30
So if people would like to get, oh, I don't know, a stiffer
21:35
whiff of this, they can go read anything by Patrick Denny.
21:39
Yes, indeed. So this is just.
21:40
This is basically that it's the same period of time politically
21:45
and socially that that gave birth to mercantilism, which
21:49
just got just figured out for the umpteenth time in our
21:53
history with the tariffs. Is a bad idea.
21:57
That's exactly it. And you know what?
21:59
The post liberals, if you ask them about economic questions,
22:02
guess what? They default to tariffs.
22:05
They absolutely end the stuff. And, and look, one of the the
22:09
I'll just throw another name out on the heap or in Cass, who has
22:14
everybody's ear, who declared himself an economist.
22:18
Not an economist, no, No. But he, he, he's the only fake
22:22
economist that they really listen to that.
22:25
That's right, I'm a I'm a fake economist.
22:27
Why not me? You.
22:29
Haven't declared yourself when you got to give yourself a title
22:31
and I'm going to create a fake think tank as well and American
22:35
I could. Do those things.
22:36
Yeah, I could do those things and and buddy up the JD Vance
22:40
and Org cast runs. In these post liberal world,
22:44
this is kind of a weird academic movement, and I've traced the
22:47
history of this. I've published a few articles on
22:49
it and work with some other scholars who have as well, and
22:52
it really only pops onto the scene about the earliest
22:56
origins, about the mid 2000s. They give themselves the name,
23:00
the self assigned name of post liberalism.
23:03
The earliest I can find that is in 2011.
23:05
So it's a very recent emergence in the political scene.
23:09
You mentioned Patrick Deneen's one of them.
23:11
He's the political theory professor at Notre Dame and it's
23:17
kind of seen as like the godfather, the post liberal
23:19
scene. You know, he he he likes the
23:21
medieval world and he wants to go back to that is a place and
23:25
what why you say that? But and you read his writings,
23:28
he views modernity as a revulsion against nature.
23:34
He thinks that we we have exceeded our boundaries of the
23:37
earth's offerings to us, which are really God's offerings to
23:40
us. And we have to go back to that.
23:42
And look not not to let's at least be fair for a minute right
23:47
there. There are intellectual
23:49
underpinnings to this which are legitimate, right?
23:52
We can look to people like Wilmore Kendall.
23:55
Sure, sure. I think and and see somebody who
23:59
wants a more bucolic way of life.
24:01
Yeah, or or old agrarian style thinkers.
24:06
It's the difference between like wanting to live in the Shire
24:08
with the hobbits and wanting to live in the medieval monastery.
24:14
I think that's that's right. There's is.
24:17
They can all go and do that. Yeah, they don't want that.
24:20
They want to force us to live that way.
24:22
There's to do. It.
24:24
And there's a fair amount of Christian nationalism woven into
24:27
this nonsense. Yeah.
24:29
It is. And the other interesting thing,
24:32
the Church doesn't like them, of course, doesn't believe in this
24:36
nonsense. So so they they present
24:39
themselves as like holier than thou, more Catholic than thou,
24:42
quite literally more Catholic than the Pope, as JD Van seems
24:45
to have proclaimed himself. Well, we used to be more
24:50
Catholic than the Pope. Well, well, the post liberal
24:52
certainly think they are. But and the Vatican's kind of
24:55
stayed away from this, but they did the the nun CEO to the
24:58
United States, Cardinal Pierre, that's a very top Vatican
25:03
official is basically speaking on behalf of the Pope published
25:08
A lecture last fall where he he he targeted what he called
25:12
illiberal authoritarian strains of thought in American politics.
25:16
And he said there are two of them.
25:17
One of them is wokeness on the left and the other he says is
25:21
post liberalism on the right. He named the Dean in there.
25:24
He says this instrumentalizes the faith to worldly political
25:29
ends. This is against Catholic social
25:31
teaching, even though it's cloaked itself up in that.
25:34
Hooray for him is supposed, because those are, in my
25:38
opinion, our two biggest enemies, one on the left, one on
25:42
the right, and then they are both thoroughly illiberal.
25:46
It's just sad that one of them openly refers to itself as
25:50
illiberal. Indeed, that's Victor Ormond,
25:54
and you got these other characters around them.
25:56
So Denine's the political theory guy, Adrian Vermeul at Harvard,
26:01
who's a law professor there. And he kind of pops up on the
26:05
scene as well in the mid 2000s as like a, a, a very hawkish,
26:11
almost Dick Cheney style centralized presidential power.
26:15
Because we're in a state of emergency and we need to defeat
26:18
terrorism and al Qaeda. And we're always the courts are
26:21
not up to the staff. We're always in the state of.
26:24
Exactly so. So he was, he was that guy.
26:27
Like he writes all these books on presidential power in the mid
26:30
2000s. Of course, the War on Terror, it
26:34
kind of fades as an issue. It's no longer with us.
26:37
But he keeps his prescriptions of centralizing the presidency
26:40
around him, around all these emergencies that are declared
26:44
everything. And you know, the, the terrorism
26:46
emergency becomes the COVID emergency becomes the, I guess
26:50
the, the, the trade deficit emergencies, the current 1.
26:53
Sure. The immigration emergency.
26:56
Yeah, Yeah, it's different emergency and Vermeul believes
27:01
this and he says, well, emergencies require strong
27:05
executive action and and he turns his fire on originalism.
27:10
He thinks Madisonian democracy and constitutionalism of
27:14
separated powers and checks and balances and basically our core
27:18
constitutional order. He thinks that that is an
27:21
aberration against the natural order of things.
27:24
Sure. And now, now I now I sense there
27:28
you're about to link the 2 worlds that you've been talking
27:30
about. Indeed, I am so, so, so.
27:33
Here's Adrian Vermeul and and Patrick Deneen.
27:35
They're fostering this intellectual community.
27:38
Vermeul stumbles across this political theorist by the name
27:41
of Carl Schmidt and Carl Schmidt.
27:45
Yeah, I, I, I know exactly who Carl Schmidt is, but go ahead
27:49
and tell everybody else the. Your your listener so Carl
27:52
Schmidt says he's a German jurist in the 1920s and 30s,
27:57
which. Should be sending up warning
27:59
threads to everybody with a historical sense of anything.
28:03
Yeah, so and there and he's a he's of the kind of the
28:05
reactionary riots of the the European scene.
28:09
And in the in the 1920s, he decides that the Weimar
28:11
constitution is like polluted by liberalism and by liberalism
28:15
means classical liberalism. Now the Weimar constitution had
28:18
a bunch of problems with it, but like this guy's diagnosis of it
28:21
is it lacks a strong leader. It lacks a representative of the
28:26
German people. Well, it lacks A purer might be
28:30
the. Word as, as Larry would have it.
28:33
An. Answer for this well.
28:35
And he got his opportunity in 1933, Hitler seized to power.
28:40
And Schmidt basically goes to kiss this guy's ass.
28:44
And he ingratiates himself to the right.
28:48
And he attains this academic post as a essentially like a
28:52
crown jurist of the head of the German legal profession
28:56
sanctioned by the Nazi government.
28:58
He's close personal friends with Herman Gearing, deeply enmeshed
29:03
in the Hitler regime of applying all these theories he's done
29:06
about centralizing executive power against the the failures
29:09
of liberal constitutionalism into the principle of the
29:13
Fuhrer. Now in 1934, there's this little
29:16
incident called the Night of the Long Knives, and that's when
29:19
Hitler sends all his goons to murder basically all the
29:22
political opposition, the residual politicians that could
29:26
challenge him in the future for chancellor.
29:29
So they assassinate like former chancellors of Germany,
29:32
opposition leaders, even the faction in the Nazi party that
29:36
was at odds with the other factions in the Nazi party.
29:39
You know, they're, they're always feuding with each other.
29:41
But it's Hitler's consolidation of power.
29:43
And Schmidt pens this essay basically declaring, well, this
29:47
was the consummation of the state of exception, the state of
29:50
emergency when the constitutional order, IE court
29:54
rulings and rights and all the things that we take for granted,
29:59
that they failed to address the threat to the German nation.
30:02
And the Fuhrer stepped into that void and he acted on behalf of
30:06
the German people and saved Germany.
30:09
And that's Schmidt's whole shtick wrapped up in that
30:11
political event. Now he his academic career kind
30:15
of goes on the rocks after about 1945.
30:18
Imagine that. Yeah, and he and he retires,
30:21
although he, he, he escapes some of the criminality of like the
30:26
Nuremberg trials because he's not in an official capacity,
30:29
although he'd spent years as like a cheerleader for Nazi
30:32
Germany. So he, but he's discredited,
30:35
goes into retirement and he actually dies in the 1980s and
30:39
he had faded into obscurity and especially in the English
30:42
speaking world by then, there's some people on the far right.
30:45
And then weirdly, the far left rediscovers him in the European
30:48
sea. But so he dies in 1986.
30:52
And I've done some research into this to try to find out Did any
30:55
English newspapers cover Schmidt's obituary?
31:00
Hard to match a single one. Yeah, it would be hard to match.
31:03
I I did a full nationwide newspaper search in 1986.
31:06
There are more references to the closing of the Carl Schmidt
31:10
Landfill in Wisconsin than there are to Carl Schmidt's death.
31:15
Yeah, and it's now like an EPA Superfund site.
31:18
All right, so you're going to have to you're going to have to
31:21
entertain me here for a minute. Why are we talking about Nazis
31:25
when we started talking about Hungarians and then we talked
31:28
about American Post leaders? Well, because Adrian Vermeul
31:32
discovers Carl Schmidt and sets out on a mission to rehabilitate
31:36
him. He declares his objections to
31:38
the Madisonian constitutional order are fatal in the modern
31:41
era because it's obsolete. It's out with its usefulness.
31:45
We need a strong executive step in his place.
31:48
And Carl Schmidt has provided him the framework.
31:51
And he says, what, We'll scrape the marrow out of the bone,
31:54
discard the Nazi stuff. And I'm paraphrasing here, but
31:57
pretty closely. And and Vermul's 2011 book he
32:02
says we as legal theorists need to midwife the post liberal
32:07
order of a new strong executive state based on the theories of
32:11
Carl Schmidt. And Viktor Orban was the model
32:14
of this state. Well.
32:15
He becomes the one that they sent a lot because there are
32:17
some other players in this faction.
32:19
And this is where JD Vance comes into the picture.
32:22
So there's a third political theorist that hangs out with the
32:26
Denine Vermeul crowd by the name of Gladden, Papen and Papen I
32:32
especially. Don't like that one?
32:35
He had a history, you know, he, he was involved in the, in this
32:39
thing called the the American Greatness Blog, you may remember
32:42
from the first Trump administration.
32:45
Yeah, and, and probably it's time for a disclaimer.
32:49
The American Greatness blog comes from the same intellectual
32:53
heritage that I do at the Claremont Graduate School slash
32:59
Claremont Institute, the first of which I had plenty to do
33:03
with, the second of which I had nothing to do with.
33:06
Yeah, yeah. And so that was the thing.
33:08
It published this. The famous essay was the Flight
33:11
93 election. Written by my my friend and
33:14
former colleague Michael Anton. Yes, yes.
33:17
Well, Papen was one of the other anonymous bloggers, and you
33:20
know, he gave himself like a an ancient Greek name because of
33:23
course they do. What else would you do?
33:25
Right, right. But he, and he was a like this
33:28
minor political theorist. He taught at a small liberal
33:30
arts school. You look at this guy's TV, he's
33:33
got nothing on there. His most cited article is
33:37
basically a blog post in a journal that he also happens to
33:40
edit and has 10 citations. Not not much in the way of
33:45
intellectual accomplishment going on there, really a
33:47
backwater. But he befriends JD Vance around
33:52
2016 or 17. So right after the Hillbilly
33:54
Elegy thing comes out, Vance starts hanging out with the Post
33:58
Liberals. He meets Dineen, he meets for
34:00
Mule, and he especially meets Gladden Papen.
34:03
In fact, there was a story when Vance ran was announced as the
34:06
vice presidential candidate where some reporter found like
34:09
his Venmo record was left public.
34:13
Gladden Papen is one of the guys in there.
34:15
So these are personal friends predating the political career.
34:20
So Pappins are really eccentric character, to put it mildly.
34:24
You know, he writes all these tomes where he he thinks that
34:28
the problem with American conservatism from the Bush era
34:32
is it's too libertarian. Oh good Lord.
34:36
He write about all these essays that that that the Bush style
34:40
Republican Party was too libertarian and and was captive
34:44
by the laissez faire free market economist.
34:47
It doesn't even matter which of the bushes you're referring to
34:50
that no, actually incorrect. It is out there.
34:53
It's certainly out there and and of course never substantiates
34:56
that. He just declares it so and he
34:59
but he comes up with this theory that that basically says, and it
35:02
sounds a lot like Nancy McClain. He thinks that after the New
35:06
Deal, the libertarian economic space, the free market economist
35:11
types, invaded the political right and used their big fancy
35:15
dark money donors to steer conservatism away from its focus
35:22
on the historical common good. By which he means is like back
35:25
to medievalism, getting into consumerist capitalist
35:30
acquisition. And Papen writes this whole
35:34
lecture that he gives where his claim is that, you know, all
35:37
these things that we start seeing of wokeness out of the
35:39
the left in the mid twenty 10s. It's not really the academic
35:45
left that's the source there. He says this is the corporations
35:48
that are pushing this because they're trying to, you know,
35:54
exploit individualism and mold humanity into this hedonistic,
36:00
licentious, libertine consumerist culture that sits
36:04
around and is addicted to pornography and orders Uber Eats
36:08
and watches cartoons all day. That's the dumbest thing I've
36:11
heard all day. It is out there and even has a
36:15
name for it. Tucker Carlson uses the same
36:18
way. He calls it the Globo Homo
36:20
Complex. So this, this is really, really
36:25
out there. And, and I start reading up on
36:27
this guy. It's like, where does he pop up
36:29
out of the The American Greatness blog?
36:32
Because a few years later he shows up, he's in Budapest.
36:36
And it turns out around 2020 or 21, he visited over to Viktor
36:44
Orban's government because what Orban started to do is part of
36:48
his consolidation of power. He starts banning universities
36:52
that represented the left wing viewpoint, really went after
36:54
George Soros and drove a Soros funded school out of Hungary.
36:59
But he's also at the same time using state resources to create
37:03
his own university system and intellectual environment from
37:08
the right. But it's this illiberal right
37:10
that he's trying to brand. So he he creates this thing
37:13
called Matthias Corvinus Collegium and he dumps over a
37:17
billion EUR worth of state assets into its endowment.
37:22
Good God. Whatever do, whatever did they
37:25
do with that endowment, Phil? Well.
37:27
First, they hired a a board of trustees that also happened to
37:31
be like basically Orban's own cabinet.
37:34
Sounds right. I'll check this out.
37:37
So the same people holding multiple different hats.
37:40
So you have this nominally private university funded by
37:43
state money that's also chaired by Orban's political director
37:47
and all these ministers and high-ranking members of the
37:51
Fidesz party. All right, so I can tell why
37:57
America matters to Hungary. Yes, during the Orban years.
38:02
But what I can't really get my hands on quite yet is why
38:05
Hungary matters to America. And that's what I LED with, yes.
38:09
Yes. So, you know, and there in hangs
38:13
a tale what he Orban creates this university, Victor Orban
38:17
University. He starts trying to build its
38:20
academic credibility by recruiting American academics to
38:24
come over there and guest lecture and maybe stay for a
38:27
semester and teach. And one of the first ones he
38:30
picks is this Gladden Papen character.
38:34
And Papen goes over there in 2021.
38:37
I actually found the lecture or essay where he explains why he
38:42
went over there. And it's it's a really strange
38:45
tale. He said he he got so offended
38:47
because he he saw like a a gay pride month clothing catalog
38:51
from Target in the United States and decided that was Globo homo
38:57
imposing its will through the capitalist economy on everyone
39:00
and he had to flee the country. So he he moves over to Hungary
39:05
and decides that Orban has cultivated the the the
39:09
groundwork for an alternative non capitalistic economic system
39:13
rooted on family economics and what this basically means.
39:17
And Papen says this outright in his essays and speeches, is
39:21
taking the tools of the New Deal.
39:23
But instead of using them to promote progressivism, we
39:26
promote family values of a very certain type that aligns with
39:30
this traditionalist notion of how society should run.
39:33
What that means is the government uses a welfare state
39:36
to encourage families to have a male breadwinner, a wife who's
39:40
at home rearing the kids, and lots and lots of kids who are
39:44
subsidized by the government. Aunt, would you like to maybe
39:48
have a comment on that? I'm just astounded.
39:51
I'm just astounded as an educator.
39:53
I feel like a complete failure that we got to somehow reteach
39:59
economics from the ground up every 20 years.
40:03
Because people keep. Trying.
40:05
Look, we've done all of this. We've done it many times over
40:09
many centuries with the same result every single time.
40:13
And no, this time it is not different.
40:16
There is nothing different about this.
40:19
Well, it it and it gets even wild here because this up
40:22
happened. He's at this university for
40:25
about a year. And then Orban offers him a
40:28
promotion and says, well, you were a visiting faculty here.
40:31
I want to give you a promotion. It's not a promotion in the
40:33
university. It's a promotion to be the head
40:37
of the foreign affairs ministry of Hungary's research arm,
40:44
Hungarian, of the Institute of International Affairs, this
40:47
government position. And he he names this American
40:50
professor who doesn't speak a word of Hungarian, is the new
40:54
head of the research arm of the equivalent of the Hungarian
40:57
State Department. Now I got to I got to pause here
41:00
for a second. Papen actually is a bona fide
41:03
academic. He of of sorts Harvard PhD and
41:08
he taught at a couple liberal arts colleges.
41:11
I don't think he was ever in like a tenured position and just
41:14
kind of melts around. It can't be.
41:15
Economics. It's political theory.
41:18
OK, Yeah. Because that's, that's that's
41:20
how you do all of this newfangled economics is you find
41:24
someone who isn't an economist. Even better, when he needs an
41:29
economist, guess who he calls? Boring cast.
41:35
This, this game is just too, too easy.
41:39
Phil I I dare say my memory might be faulty on this, but I
41:45
think you and I once worked for a guy on the goulash train.
41:49
Yeah, this is this is the term of use.
41:52
It's the Hungarian government Goulash train 'cause you are
41:54
Gladden Papen starts inviting all of his post liberal friends
41:59
and other people in the Trump world over to Budapest for to
42:03
speak at their academic conferences.
42:06
And it starts with his close friends.
42:08
Adrian Vermeul, Patrick Deneen comes over there just a whole
42:13
list of all these these characters.
42:15
Curtis Yarvin is is another one that he brings over to speak.
42:20
Just it's runs down the list. And then yes, there are certain
42:24
high-ranking officials in the current Trump administration
42:28
that have gone over and visited Budapest, and we're friends with
42:33
Gladden Papand before. You know.
42:37
Trump was hilarious, but. The hilarious thing here is that
42:42
these morons and these people are morons.
42:45
These morons went over to Hungary to see the future of the
42:50
world, right? And I hope this election in
42:54
Hungary is the future of the world.
42:57
All right, right. It's that's one of the ends.
42:59
So, so Peter Magyar is the the opposition leader that unseated
43:03
Orban. One of the first things he says
43:05
is he's going to defund the goulash train, or as, as my
43:10
friend James Patterson calls it, the Grand Budapest Cartel.
43:14
And Patterson wrote an excellent article on all of this that
43:19
well, our receipts. And names, names and everything
43:21
you you need it. Was it was fantastic.
43:24
I can't remember the title of it right this second, can you?
43:27
Oh yeah. Yeah, that the Grand Budapest
43:30
Cartel. So go, go look that one, yeah,
43:33
is. It is worth reading.
43:35
Worth 5 minutes of your time. Without there, this is funded
43:38
by, I'm assuming, taxpayer money.
43:41
Entirely, it's the, the Orban government, you know, put over a
43:45
billion EUR of money into this one thing.
43:47
And then they got dozens of other little think tanks and
43:50
things that are subsidized by the Hungarian government.
43:53
And, and they're providing all these emoluments and sinecures
43:56
and fancy junkets to Budapest, to American academics to come
44:00
over there and, and like tell them how wonderful that they are
44:04
and that this is the center of conservative thinking.
44:08
And a whole bunch of these people are, are close personal
44:11
friends of JD Vance, which brings us to what happened the
44:14
week before the election. Well, it seems like a bunch of
44:17
Vance's friends over in Budapest 'cause he starts recruiting
44:21
Orban, starts recruiting more people like Patent Pappen to
44:24
move to Budapest and gives them these jobs.
44:28
There's another character. He's Auk.
44:31
He was Auk based podcaster by the name of Philip Pilkington.
44:35
He was on the post liberal scene there again, here's the the
44:39
economic craziness of it. So they asked Corin cast for
44:41
advice. They also Pilkington does have a
44:44
master's degree or something in economics, but he trained at the
44:48
Modern Monetary Theory Group, right?
44:53
Of course he did. And, you know, Viktor Orban last
44:58
year had a major inflationary crisis because he was following
45:01
Modern Monetary Theory. So the the the Hungarian central
45:05
bank is not part of the euro for for.
45:07
Our listeners who have not heard our many screeds against MMT
45:12
Modern monetary theory, I point you to the inflation of 2022.
45:17
That's what you get. That's modern modern monetary
45:19
theory. That that is, it's print money
45:22
and say, oh, we're the government, so we're we're
45:24
immune to yeah. We can cover it, It's OK.
45:27
And so Orban basically pursues that and it gets even better.
45:31
Last year and then again earlier this year before his RE
45:34
election. Of course, inflation is out of
45:36
control in Hungary. It's the worst in the European
45:39
Union. They're on their own currency
45:41
separate from the euro. So that happens.
45:44
What's Viktor Orban's solution to it?
45:47
Greed, inflationary price controls the Kamala Harris
45:50
solution as advised to him by these Modern Monetary Theory
45:54
people that he's recruiting to. Is it any wonder that Hungarians
46:04
lined up around the block to vote against this nonsense?
46:06
This guy. Out.
46:07
Yep. Yeah.
46:08
So it they. Did.
46:12
It kind of warms. Does my heart, does my black
46:16
heart have cockles? If it did, they would be warmed
46:19
by this. Yes.
46:21
Right. This is actually a wonderful
46:24
political outcome. Yes.
46:25
And I, yes. I don't.
46:27
I can't remember the last time I've said that.
46:30
I think what it goes to, you know, post liberal politics,
46:34
they present themselves, they graft themselves onto the name
46:37
of populism. And that was their way to get
46:38
attached to Trump. But they're Potemkin populist.
46:42
It's actually a very, very tiny fringe movement.
46:46
You know, it's insidious. It's absolutely insidious.
46:50
So Vermeen, Vermeul and Deneen are the only two that have
46:54
something like a mainstream academic job and it and it's all
46:58
but they're the older generation.
47:00
It goes back decades. You have like these B&C tier
47:03
academics that are, are now the, the basically the field team for
47:08
post liberalism that's brought over into the Orban space.
47:12
But it's a very, very tiny group of concentric overlapping
47:15
people. And they all happen to be
47:16
friends with JD Vance, predating his political career.
47:20
And that's why the vice president would go help them
47:22
out. But it, you know, at the end of
47:24
the day, they're not populist at all.
47:26
I, I don't think Donald Trump for all of his many other
47:29
problems, I don't think he's opposed to liberal.
47:32
I don't think he knows what the word means.
47:34
No, I don't have look to to be a post liberal.
47:37
I mean, let's, let's take it seriously for a second.
47:40
To be a post liberal, you would have to conclude that there was
47:45
something beyond the absolute inviolability of the individual,
47:53
which is what liberalism is founded upon.
47:57
And notice I'm saying liberal, not progressive.
48:00
I'm not, I'm not talking about Democrats here.
48:02
I'm I'm a liberal. We're all liberals.
48:05
And if if you think that there's something beyond the
48:10
inviolability of the individual, you're not too far off from
48:15
where Carl Schmidt started us down this way.
48:17
That's. Where they go and you look at
48:19
when they think they're among their own friends, Danine and
48:22
Vermeul and some of these other characters, when they think
48:25
they're among fellow post liberal.
48:26
So the the the tiny little circle of all 17 of them, and
48:30
they're talking to each other. They are not fans of the
48:33
American founding. They think the American founding
48:35
is tainted by individualism and liberalism and the the insidious
48:41
forces of John Locke is transmitted through Thomas
48:43
Jefferson and James Madison. And their whole thing is well,
48:47
well, we had a flawed founding, a corrupted founding that was
48:51
too individualistic, and they basically arrived at the same
48:54
place as the 1619 project. They say the founding itself is
48:58
corrupt and we need to be refounded as a nation around
49:02
what they call the common good. Now, they can't define what the
49:05
common good means, but when you start probing them and say what?
49:09
What's this term? It starts to sound a lot like
49:12
their little preference for weird medieval anti modernist
49:17
repudiation of the of the world. Like right wing growth is a good
49:20
way to put. It it it's that's right, it's
49:24
anti progress horseshit. And look, the The American
49:27
founding featured those things. Exactly.
49:32
Exactly. Wasn't Hanford by them?
49:34
It was probably the single greatest effort in mankind to
49:40
operationalize what we probably largely call the Enlightenment.
49:46
Exactly, exactly. And it is drawing on, yes, there
49:49
are deeper traditions in that that go back to the Middle Ages,
49:52
go back to the ancient world, but there learned traditions
49:56
that are adapted and built upon. It basically comes down to an
50:00
ethos of liberty as a mechanism to keep us from killing each
50:04
other. And and the chaos that had
50:06
proceeded for centuries and centuries of warfare and turmoil
50:09
and abuses by government. Well, the post liberals think
50:13
that that somehow was the golden age and it's actually the modern
50:17
era that's the aberration. And the United States is a
50:22
complete failure of an experiment in that aberration.
50:26
Therefore it needs to kind of be stamped out.
50:28
The way it brings. Back to me.
50:31
I won't kill each other. You just want to kill off the
50:33
right people. It's the right.
50:35
People you always envision themselves in charge.
50:38
It. It's curious both them in 1619
50:41
just separate non overlapping groups.
50:44
But here's here's my question. JJD Vance is going to run on the
50:50
Republican ticket, I'm sure. How How does he survive?
50:55
Because his opponents are going to come back and hang all of
50:58
this around his neck. I, I hope they do.
51:01
I think there's. There's no way JD Vance gets the
51:05
Republican nomination. No way.
51:07
Unfavorability rating right now is hovering about like 58 or
51:11
60%. As long as Marco Rubio is alive
51:15
and drawing breath, Vance will never see the head of that
51:19
ticket. Somebody else might, right?
51:22
But but Rubio will stand right in his way.
51:25
Look, I the, the fundamental question I, I would want to ask
51:28
these fools is, is, is this. Look, I, I lived in a place that
51:35
you're describing. It's Iraq.
51:37
It's Iraq, yes. Yeah.
51:39
You want to go there? Well, I've been in conversations
51:43
with other post liberals at academic conferences and things
51:47
because they occasionally show up and sometimes they'll put
51:49
them on the stage and try to explain what post liberalism is.
51:52
And while everyone else in the room is is actually a right
51:55
liberal and corrupted by the the spirit of individualism.
51:59
But I asked a couple places of vast post liberals, what is the
52:03
model society you envision? Are there any examples in the
52:07
world both today and historically?
52:09
Well, today, up until a few weeks ago, it was Viktor Orban.
52:13
Sure. But the historical examples they
52:15
give I think are are equally revealing.
52:19
They say Salazars, Portugal and Francisco Franco's Spain.
52:24
Holy. So the 1950s Iberian Peninsula,
52:30
these were the soft fascists, the ones that were not drawn
52:32
into World War 2, that were were.
52:36
And you know, for all the issues that I'm not going to get into
52:39
the politics of Iberia in the 20th century, it was just a
52:43
giant mess. There were terrible actors on
52:45
the left, terrible actors on the right, but you got essentially 2
52:49
dictatorships that emerged with Salazar and Franco.
52:52
And they're very repressive societies.
52:54
They're also economic backwaters, like left in
52:58
stagnation for decades behind the rest of Western Europe.
53:02
And it's only until the 1970s when these two characters or, or
53:06
they eventually die. And you know, Franco had always
53:10
thought, well, I'm going to hand my power back over to the heir
53:13
to the Spanish throne, the king of Spain.
53:15
He never bothered to check that the heir to the throne didn't
53:18
want this illiberal autocracy that he had set up and, and, and
53:23
quickly becomes a, a constitutional monarch in a very
53:27
modern sense. So, so again, these people are
53:30
living in fantasy worlds. They, a lot of them are outright
53:33
monarchists. If you look in the Atlantic a
53:36
few weeks ago, Gladden Papen, they verified this story that
53:40
had been circulating for years. At some point during the first
53:43
Trump term, I guess when he was doing the American Greatness
53:45
blog, he was apparently at some conservative conference among
53:50
academics and he started spouting this crazy conspiracy
53:53
theory that claimed Pope Francis was going to cancel the US
53:58
elections and empower Donald Trump to name Melania Trump, who
54:04
was Catholic Queen of America, the Catholic Monarch of America
54:09
and rule from there on out. And, and, and people were like,
54:12
are you, you're joking, right? He's no, this is going to
54:15
happen. This is kind of the vibe.
54:17
And then the updated versions of it is there are people in the.
54:22
This is like the Jehovah's Witnesses predicting the end of
54:26
days, right? They pick another day and and
54:28
kick it down the road. Right, it's so so the Pope
54:32
doesn't cancel the election and then the like the the successor
54:35
to this that you saw in some of the online post liberal
54:37
communities. Well, the new Pope is going to
54:40
anoint JD Vance as King of America and then we'll and he'll
54:43
install the the Catholic integralist monarchy that never
54:47
bothering to ask if the Pope is at all interest.
54:49
And it turns out the Pope is not, and the Pope's Nunzio
54:53
specifically denounces this as authoritarian.
54:56
This has officially gotten too stupid for words and notes.
55:02
It's the first time that's ever happened and we have talked
55:07
about some dopey shit over the years.
55:10
This is the first time I have ever had to say, and we're
55:16
actually the only correct ending to this is the aristocrats.
55:23
And those of you who know the joke will get the joke.
55:26
And those of you who don't know the joke, go learn the joke.
55:30
But there we are. Phil, is there anything else you
55:34
might like to talk about? What are you up to these days?
55:37
Anything you want to tell people to go see?
55:40
Well, you know, I always say check out my work at
55:42
independent.org, check out my my Twitter feed.
55:46
I am doing some some intellectual stuff on trying to
55:49
trace this lineage of how Carl Schmidt got rehabilitated.
55:53
All right. I won't talk about that, right?
55:54
Yeah, for another episode that it's an ugly story and the post
55:58
liberals are part. And my, my people are also part
56:02
of this. Well, there look, there was a
56:05
Schmidt Strauss correspondent. Yes, there was.
56:08
Yeah. And and it and that's a serious
56:11
thing. Yeah, comes out the better side
56:14
of that correspondence. With the without question and I,
56:17
I wish he hadn't engaged in that court at all, right?
56:21
Would that would have been the better answer?
56:24
But I, I will throw one last plug.
56:27
Phil will be joining me here in Tucson.
56:30
What is it? June 11th.
56:32
I believe it is there about Phil.
56:34
To, to talk about something or another at a nice place here in
56:38
town. So if you happen to be nearby or
56:41
would like to come and visit and hang out with both me and Phil
56:44
Anthony's not invited Kamano and and until then, Phil, thanks for
56:51
coming back. This was a walk through the
56:55
intellectual weeds. Yes, it was intellectual.
57:00
Is it that's? I mean might have been.
57:05
Smoking some of those weeds. These those are role theaters.
57:09
Good God man, well I I do look forward to finding out who these
57:14
fools glom onto next because participants in a gravy train
57:20
always go look for another gravy train.
57:23
Yeah, I suspect JD Mance is hiring.
57:27
Well, you know, that's not going to be profitable enough.
57:30
They're going to need foreign coffers to fill their pockets.
57:33
Well, look, the the the whole story was ridiculous enough, so
57:37
I might as well throw out what's the obvious next step after the
57:41
nuncio saying that no, the Pope is not going to crown JD Vance
57:46
king. And that is to pick up these
57:50
what is the term, seductivists. Oh, the sediment, yes, the
57:55
maintenance in, in the yeah, this this fringe.
57:59
And fringe is too, is too inclusive a word here.
58:03
Fringe groups, yeah, that believe that the papacy was not
58:08
passed down correctly and therefore it does not sit with
58:11
the current Pope. But there's actually this guy
58:14
over here who lives in Wisconsin or something, right?
58:17
Is. The actual Pope, so they'll no
58:19
doubt corral him to anoint JD Vance.
58:23
Is King out there? I I think we should do our part
58:27
to bring that about. I think that.
58:30
That we should find you and have him on as a guest.
58:34
That would be the funniest possible outcome to all of this,
58:39
Phil. Need fully encourage it.
58:41
I, I, I can't. Good God, man.
58:45
Every time you come, the subject matter just gets Dumber.
58:51
But deep down in my heart, I know somebody's going to do
58:54
something even Dumber than this. Oh, yeah.
58:56
And it's not going to. It's not going to be long.
58:58
It'll swing back to the Marxist soon enough.
59:00
Yeah, well, it always does. It always does.
59:05
And and when that happens, we'll give you a call.
59:08
Thanks again, Phil, for for stopping by.
59:10
Always, always a pleasure.