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More Statesmen, Please · Q & A, Hosted by Jay Nordlinger

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Q&A.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Jay Nordlinger,
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: and our guest today is one of my favorites,
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen B. Smith, the scholar of political philosophy.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: He is a Chicagoan,
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: not a North Shore kid,
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: but a gritty South Sider who would earn his PhD at the local school,
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: the University of Chicago.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Since 1984, he has taught at Yale, where he is the Alfred Coles Professor of Political Science.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: He's the author of many books, including Modernity and Its Discontents.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: Back in 2021, we talked about his then new book, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: He has now written On Statesmanship.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: It is a beautiful,
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: learned book which distills years of study and thinking and raw human experience,
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: I would say.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Let me hold it up.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Look at this attractive book.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: And Stephen, welcome.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Jay, thank you.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's a pleasure.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that lovely introduction.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: I really, that's really, I loved the introduction.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yale, I have to say, really produces an attractive book.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I had nothing to do with the design, but they do a great job.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think that aesthetics is the best of all of the kind of big presses.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: The physical product makes a difference, doesn't it?
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: You work so hard on a book and you want it to be an appealing,
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: attractive physical product as well.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't agree more.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the old phrase is you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but maybe sometimes you can.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: I love the cover.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen, I'll tell you one thing I admire about the title.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: First of all,
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: it's shortened to the point and it tells you what the book is about,
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: but there's no subtitle and it doesn't need a subtitle.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: I remember we had on this program,
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: we had George Will when he had published his book, The Conservative Sensibility.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: No subtitle.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: One wasn't necessary.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the same with on statesmanship.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: We actually went through a Two or three titles.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And this was the one that we all just kind of spontaneously agreed was sounded best
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: and captured the essence of the book best.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Again, clarity, simplicity, no subtitle, two words.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's all you need.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: And statesmanship is a long enough word.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: It can do with the short word on beforehand.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: It can do that.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I have a question for you, but I'd like to open with a story, one you may have heard.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I learned it from my late friend,
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: Van Galbraith,
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Evan Galbraith, who was the U.S. ambassador to France in the first Reagan term.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Van was an old Yalie close friend and classmate of Bill Buckley, and he was ambassador there.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: And Reagan came to town, came to Paris, and I think 1984...
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: And he was informed by a staffer,
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: he was misinformed that the French government intended to award him
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: the Croix de Guerre for military valor.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: He said, no, I couldn't possibly accept that.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: He said, you know, I spent the war, World War II in San Francisco and LA making training films.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: And Van broke in and said, no, no, Mr. President, they want to make you a grand officer.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Of the Legion of Honor.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that is for statesmanship.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he sort of straightened up and said, I can play that role.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he'd been an actor.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: He said, I can play that role.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so this he accepted.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I just want to know, what is a statesman?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: What is statesmanship?
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: Is a statesman, I imagine it's not simply someone who holds an office.
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  SPEAKER_01: There must be more to it.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: Say the necessary.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, great.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's a lovely story, by the way.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: I had not heard that.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was really nice.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I mean, there's something like, I believe, 195 or 198 states in the world.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Some kind of president, prime minister, head of state, executive in some manner or other.
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  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't make them statesmen.
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  SPEAKER_00: Statesman is not an office.
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  SPEAKER_00: You can't be elected as statesman.
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  SPEAKER_00: It is a judgment in many ways that we make about a political leader based
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: on their character, based on their wisdom, based on their success in some respects.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it comes with a certain kind of judgment.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: What distinguishes the statesman?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: I spend a lot of time in the book making certain distinctions between statesmen
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  SPEAKER_00: and other types of leaders.
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  SPEAKER_00: But to get to the crux of your question, what makes the statesman?
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  SPEAKER_00: I argue that while statesmen typically embody certain Virtues of character,
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  SPEAKER_00: determination,
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  SPEAKER_00: willingness to make an unpopular decision,
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  SPEAKER_00: usually ones that have to turn out right, courage, a certain kind of civil courage.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: But what makes the greatest statesmen,
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: and this might sound strange,
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: but what makes the greatest statesmen is that they shape their countries
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: and their destinies through the power of language.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: The greatest statesmen are those who use language to define a people and give them
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: an object of aspiration.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: This is what Lincoln famously did at Gettysburg and at some of his other great speeches.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: He defined what it meant to be an American.
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  SPEAKER_00: He defined what American democracy was.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I would argue that even today,
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: when we think of democracy, we do it in the terms that Lincoln
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: And this is true in many ways for many of the great leaders of,
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: let's just say, the last century.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Take one that's been in the news a little bit recently because of a movie made
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: about him,
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: it hasn't opened over here yet, Charles de Gaulle, who figures in my book.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: He ruled, he led, he always said, with a certain idea of France.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: He gave the French people an idea of what they stood for,
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: created a language in which they understood France.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Or take an example from the statesman you just mentioned, Ronald Reagan.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Reagan repurposed an image of America.
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  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't his own, but it was one that is embedded deeply in American history.
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  SPEAKER_00: America as the shining city on the hill.
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  SPEAKER_00: He used that image from the Puritan lay sermon given by John Wickham.
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  SPEAKER_00: We were a city on the hill through his language,
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  SPEAKER_00: through his character,
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  SPEAKER_00: Through his ability to speak to people's hearts and imaginations,
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  SPEAKER_00: he crafted a view of what America stood for.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that is what the greatest statesmen do.
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  SPEAKER_00: They work in many ways through the power of language,
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  SPEAKER_00: through the power of images and symbols and their ability to communicate this
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  SPEAKER_00: to people and to touch both the head and the heart.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: I was just thinking about Reagan that he got that from John Winthrop,
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: who in turn got her from the Sermon on the Mount.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a pretty good pedigree.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: Good lineage.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen, the title of one of your chapters is The Constitutional Statesman.
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  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder if you could discuss statesmen and democracies.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: Versus statesmen elsewhere if they exist in a dictatorship or some kind of authoritarianism.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's difficult because statesmanship requires,
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: they don't necessarily require democracy in our modern sense of the term,
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  SPEAKER_00: but they do require a form of constitutional government.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I prefer to speak of the constitutional statesmen.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Which is a somewhat broader term than democratic statesman because it does seem
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: to limit the pool to a great-
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Does the consent of the governed matter here?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: It does matter.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: It does matter.
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  SPEAKER_00: But one of the points I want to make in my discussion of the rise of- I talk about
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: the rise of constitutional government in the modern world.
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  SPEAKER_00: By the modern world,
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean the world of the last roughly 500 years is Constitutional governments,
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  SPEAKER_00: as we come to understand them, came into being.
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  SPEAKER_00: And they came into being in part to limit the role of great
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: men in history.
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  SPEAKER_00: Constitutions are devices for controlling or constraining power.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this is what I talk about is in many ways the paradox of
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: The constitutional statesmen that we still live with
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  SPEAKER_00: because constitutions separate powers.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: We know they separate powers, they divide powers, and they control powers.
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  SPEAKER_00: And yet democracies or representative governments of any kind require leaders.
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  SPEAKER_00: They require people of decision and strength.
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  SPEAKER_00: And of course,
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  SPEAKER_00: there are always,
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: which is usually when Statesmen come into into their own crisis moments
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  SPEAKER_00: that ordinary rules of the game can't quite comprehend.
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  SPEAKER_00: So there's always going to be a tension between constitutional government and
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: the needs of statesmanship,
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  SPEAKER_00: which Require often the ability to go beyond or to expand the powers of the office.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: And many of the great statesmen, of course, have had to deal with this.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Again, we think of Lincoln,
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Roosevelt,
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  SPEAKER_00: others who have arisen or have lived in crisis moments where they have often been
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: at odds with the rule of law and so on.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: What is central,
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: in my view,
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: to constitutional statesmanship is that there is some notion of restraint.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Constitutions impose restraints, yes,
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: but just as important is that constitutional leaders,
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  SPEAKER_00: constitutional statesmen must operate with a sense of self-restraint,
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  SPEAKER_00: that not everything
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  SPEAKER_00: Not everything is on the table.
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  SPEAKER_00: One of my images from that,
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
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  SPEAKER_00: taken relevant to a recent summer movie is Odysseus having himself found at
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: the mast.
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  SPEAKER_00: The statesman has to understand that there are limits even to their own power,
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  SPEAKER_00: that not everything is possible.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you believe that,
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  SPEAKER_00: Then you are down the road to a kind of Machiavellianism where there are no limits
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  SPEAKER_00: to what you can do except, of course, the limits of your own power.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: Don't we have a line in our treasury, confirm thy soul and self-control?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a verse from America the Beautiful, one that we don't, that's lookup-able though.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned Roosevelt, that'd be FDR.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: And you reminded me,
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen,
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: that Bill Clinton once said, again,
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: we could look this up,
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: but I think he said rather wistfully, I was never a war president.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he had two terms of relative peace and prosperity.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: There was action in the Balkans and he had to make some decisions there,
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: which were contested, these decisions.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: But I thought that was quite interesting from Clinton.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe a leader needs opportunities to be a statesman.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: You might not wish such opportunities on a leader or a country,
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: but you know what I'm getting at.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the fact is, and I think Clinton was right about that.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: I talk about that brief.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: I talk about him briefly in the book.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't figure prominently because we don't consider him a leader of that kind.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: He was in many ways a skillful manager,
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: what he liked to call triangulator of interests and groups.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: But that seems to be a very different thing from the high calling of the statesman.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact,
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: we don't usually think of statesmen as operating in,
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: you know, periods of long periods of peace and stability.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Statesmanship comes into its own,
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: usually during crisis moments and moments of profound national upheaval.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And And in many ways, that's both a blessing and a curse.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: We need statesmen.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, absolutely.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: But you wouldn't necessarily want just a steady diet of statesmen because people...
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: In many ways,
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: one of the characteristics of the statesman is,
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: in fact, to seek out these high moments of challenge and crisis in which to shine.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: And yet people, nations, require stability.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: They require orderliness.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: a steady diet of Churchill's would have been a little too rich for anybody to take.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Or de Gaulle's.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: You can, I think, see where I'm going now.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen, I was just thinking of Calvin Coolidge, who I've been looking at his speeches lately.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: For a guy named Silent Cal, he was a wonderful talker.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: He gave some fabulous substantial speeches,
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: but he governed in the Roaring Twenties, mainly a prosperous time, between the wars.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so I can't think of a crisis in the Coolidge years.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think I don't think there was.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he's famous for, you know, the business of America is business.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: And he kind of he was again, he.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: In many ways was a beneficiary of the peace after World War.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: There was
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: a so-called holiday from history in
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: which we were to reap a peace dividend.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember these old phrases?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Peace dividend, which came to an end briefly 25 years ago on September 11th.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: We were on a little bit of, you know, we had...
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: A decade, roughly, of the end of history, if we use that phrase.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: I see that Mr. Fukuyama has recently written a memoir, which kind of reviews this.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds very interesting.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, we took a little vacation, and that was fine.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think of the way in which that affected so many things.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'll just use a couple of examples from my own little part of the world in political science.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Good.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: I was very confident that the great The world of the great powers,
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: great power conflict was over.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: That we were,
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: we talked constantly about the world as being transitions to,
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: we were charting transitions to democracy wherever they existed,
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: counting the number of new nations that were becoming increasingly democratic.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, that was thrilling.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: All over Latin America, for example.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: I had a colleague many years ago,
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: I won't mention the name,
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: who said that our department,
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: political science,
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: should just abolish the field of international relations because in
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: the future it was just going to be governed by Economic agreements,
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: political economy, international political economy would be the rule of the game.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's not very human, isn't it?
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's not what we know about human beings from time immemorial.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Not what we know about human beings.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: And today, of course, the reverse is the case.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: we see democracies are far more fragile and endangered than people thought they were
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: in the 90s.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: That this kind of economic determinism,
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: which is a theory of human behavior has been refuted so many times.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: You wonder how in a world anyone can possibly still believe in it,
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: but nevertheless,
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: here we see one more proof that nations and peoples are governed much by things
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: that often go much deeper and are often much darker than,
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: the language of economics would have,
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: you know, rational actors and so on would have us believe.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen, let's back up a little bit.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: A bit ago, you spoke of the importance of words, the importance of language and statesmanship.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: And is language sometimes more important than acts?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: Or do the two of them go together?
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they go together.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to say that you can govern by words alone, by no means.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: John Stuart Mill once characterized democracy as government by discussion.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: How interesting.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: How interesting.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that shows a certain misunderstanding of what government is.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: It implies a certain collaboration, doesn't it?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: It requires collaboration and a kind of consensus politics, too.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: Good luck with that.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: Good luck.
• 18:34
  Exactly.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: But in democracies,
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: it is true that language,
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: it is in a sense government by language because democratic leaders have to speak
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: and they have to defend and they have to propose.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: And they have to convince their audience,
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: which is to say their electorates,
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: that their policies and their vision for society is the correct one.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that language not only goes from top to bottom, it also goes from bottom to top.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: So anyways,
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: democracies more than autocracies or other kinds of one man rule are
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: in some ways peculiarly speech dependent, which is why
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to think of a leader just simply ruling by fiat,
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: who could be called a statesman in any way.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: But again, you can't govern by language alone.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the best speech,
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: unless it's followed by action, unless it's followed up by decision, will be empty.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: That was the,
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: you might say,
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: the sin of sophistry, their overemphasis upon the power of speech or reason alone.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things,
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'll just riff on that thought a little bit,
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: in talking about speech,
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: speech is not,
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: it is obviously the power of words,
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: speech with power of words and language, but there's more to it than that.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Especially in the public realm,
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: which is what we're talking about, the world of politics and public realm.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: Speech has to be supported by character.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Character, what I call the ethos of a speaker, their character, their moral character.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Is not just something that is a kind of addition to speech.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's central to making people convincing and persuasive.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: If you are seen to be,
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: if you are believed to be a person of a certain type, I mean,
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: politics is not working in a lab or in some kind of scientific community,
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: where in a way the Moral characteristic of the individual doesn't make
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: that much difference in conducting a scientific experiment.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: But in the public realm, character makes a great deal of difference.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: So speech needs to be supported by the character of the speaker if it's
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: to be persuasive to people and if those words are to carry any weight at all.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's this somewhat mysterious word gravitas,
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: and a lot of people like to snicker at it,
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: you know, so-and-so has gravitas, so-and-so doesn't.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: But it is meaningful, isn't it?
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I wish I had consulted you when I wrote the book.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Gravitas is the word I use to describe the character of The required character of
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: the statesman is very similar to grappitas.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: But you took a Latin word.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: I used what was basically at root a Greek word,
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: which is sometimes translated as magnanimity, greatness of soul.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: That was Aristotle's term for the...
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: I believe that's what the word, the designation or honorific Mahatma means.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: Great soul.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: Great soul.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderful term, isn't it?
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: Wonderful term.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: And Aristotle captured that neatly,
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: very nicely in the Nicomachean Ethics and gave a whole range,
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: often very interesting to read of what constitutes he calls the great soul of man.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: You must be...
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Even after describing you, such a person must be concerned with honors of a high kind.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: He is unconcerned with small things.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: And he even wrote about things like he must He must walk slowly because he says
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: to hurry, looks undignified, have a kind of cultivated aesthetic sense.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: And he even says the great soul man must be tall because only a tall person can be commanding.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I use, again, people like George Washington.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: He's exceptionally tall.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: Lincoln, De Gaulle, all very tall.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, there's Napoleon too on the other side.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: But Aristotle really captured the character of, he called it magnanimity.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: But I think gravitas is also a very accurate depiction of the moral character
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: of Required of statesmanship.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: Reagan carried that on with dignity.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: Having a kind of dignity and self-assurance, I thought he had many of those characteristics.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen, this is maybe an odd question, a funny question.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: I was going to ask you, About the impetus for this book and doesn't need an impetus.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: This book doesn't need to be timely.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's for all time.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: Statesmanship is a subject for all time.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: I guess the reason that occurred to me this question is that your book
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: on patriotism stemmed from,
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: hearing your students after 9-11 and in the following years and patriotism was
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: on your mind.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: What is it?
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: What is it not?
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: And this book on statesmanship, had it been gelling, gestating for some time in your mind?
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: there's a character in one of Moliere's plays who says it wasn't until the age of 40
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: that he realized he'd been speaking in prose his whole life.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel...
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't been thinking about statesmanship my whole life,
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: but I didn't realize I'd actually been thinking about it in one way or another
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: for quite a long time in my teaching,
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: in various courses, and in just reflecting on politics.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: And two things were kind of driving the book,
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: one relevant to our public life and the other relevant more to academia
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: and academic life.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's clear we are suffering, not just we in America, but many places.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: We're suffering a dearth of great leaders.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there has been a rise, no doubt, a rise of authoritarian figures in the last generation.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: But the rise of great leaders, to me, is something that is notably absent in our scheme.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, there's a kind of Denial, where we act in a kind of denial about this.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: Harry Truman once joked, I mean,
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: this is back in the 50s,
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: I would assume he joked,
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: you know, a statesman is just a politician who's been dead for 10 or 15 years.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's an honorific we give to someone, but it doesn't really mean that much.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe there has been,
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: as I think many of you or many of your listeners will agree,
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: there has been a kind of Slow degradation of our politics and our public life,
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: which didn't start yesterday.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't start with Donald Trump.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's been going on for quite some time.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: In a certain mood, I say that everything is downward, ever downward.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: But often things look like that.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you look at the 30s or something, everything was downward.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that so?
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: Great, great figures.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that we can't tell.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: So things do look like they're in a downward trend.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the book is an attempt to say that democracies,
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: great democracies require great leaders and statesmen and what it is.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, And we've lost the language for it.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so that causes us to often identify frauds in various mount banks
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: as great leaders when they're not,
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: because we've simply lost the language for understanding what the statesman is.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: In academia, I mean, we just don't, it's a crime.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the concept of the statesman, I mean, is an ancient concept.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: Philosophical history.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: Plato writes a dialogue called The Statesman.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: the republic,
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: the most famous image of the republic is the philosopher king,
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: who is Plato's idea of the statesman.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: The history of political ideas has been replete with profound reflection on politics.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: Of the statesman,
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: Machiavelli's Prince,
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: Rousseau's Lawgiver,
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: Max Weber's discussion of charisma and other forms of political leadership.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: But the language for this has really kind of disappeared from the academy.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: We do a lot of speaking about democracy and a lot of thinking about democracy,
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: but very little thinking about leadership and And democracies need deep,
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: are in need of great leaders as much as any form of political society.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: So those were some of the things that led me to kind of push back against the curve.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think I've come to realize if there's a thread throughout my work,
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: it's kind of pushing back against The current and trying to revive ideas in the case
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: of patriotism that are in certain quarters unpopular or disreputable and trying
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: to rehabilitate them for people who have kind of forgotten what this language is.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's so well said.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: When you mentioned Truman, I thought of something that may interest you.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think this comes from Hank Meyer's biography of Vandenberg,
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: wonderful book,
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: that Vandenberg said after the 1948 election,
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: which Truman won in a surprise, he said, you have to hand it to the little man.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: You have to hand it to the little man.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, he was a World War I vet and had been a haberdasher.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: And a machine politician in Kansas City.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: But there was something in him, wasn't there?
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: There was something he rose to the occasion.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: And boy, was he called to do so, given what transpired during those years.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: And that's so interesting.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: You have to hand it to the little man.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, you do.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's interesting.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: Some people...
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: Step out on the public stage and they fill that stage and others are diminished.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: Others are diminished by it.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's right.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: Truman is one who stepped up and really,
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: you know, was not that perhaps that well respected in his time.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: But we have come to think of him as a as a significant as a significant figure.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure I would put him at the top of the list, the A list.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: But certainly a very, very formidable and not not all.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: One of the one of the things I discuss in the book, too,
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: we've been discussing in many ways statesmanship at some
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: of its highest levels dealing in moments of profound national crisis,
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: civil war, international conflict.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: There is virtue also in maintaining and in restoring Particularly after periods
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: of disruption and disorder.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most,
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think,
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: in many ways,
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: really profound works in the study
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: of statesmanship is Henry Kissinger's famous book,
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: The World Restored,
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: where he talks about two great European diplomats,
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: Castlereagh and Metternich,
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars and the complete upturn
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: of Europe at the time,
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: they acted as restorers,
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: trying to restore order and legitimacy to a deeply, deeply fractured world.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: And this kind of diplomacy...
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe not,
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: it doesn't operate perhaps at the, again,
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: once again at the highest level,
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: but nevertheless,
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: restorers and preservers,
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: restoration and preservation can be important works of spacecraft as well.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: Professor Stephen Smith,
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: in your book,
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: you discuss the debate surrounding the famous remark by Bertolt Brecht about heroes
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: and something like, pity the nation that needs heroes.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: But there's often need for the heroic and
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: there's often a need for the heroic in statesmanship.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: Nice if you can get it.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: I guess to sort of quote Ira Gershwin.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: But sometimes I see this in the president of Ukraine for all the problems
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: in his administration and so on.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: There was a guy, this,
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: Truman had been a haberdasher, Zelensky had been a comedian and a comedic actor.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: And here he is.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: And what do you say about, give us a little on Brecht and that whole debate.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for uh mentioning that uh that in that use of Brecht in that in
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: that context because it appears in a context of statesmen as heroes and uh
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: the book well at least part of the book not the whole book but part of
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: the book does want to say that that statesmen are national heroes and again hero is
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: in many Respects an unpopular term.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: A fear, but some legitimacy, hero worship, cults of personality, things of this sort.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: These are not admirable.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, societies need heroes.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: We need people to look up to.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: We need objects of aspiration.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, we recognize this in our ordinary life all the time.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean...
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: We look up to people who won the Nobel Prize.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: We look at people, I mean, some people still watch the Academy Awards.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: We watch that.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: Why not our statesmen as great as I think they are national heroes?
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, many people, again, there's a tendency to diminish this.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the Brecht point in his play,
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: Galileo,
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: where his disciple,
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: Galileo's disciple says,
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's something like,
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: pity the world that You know,
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: has no heroes and Brecht and Galileo purportedly says,
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: no, no, Andrea, pity the people that need a hero.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's kind of.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: I see it.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's in the mouth of a character rather than from Brecht himself.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: I never knew that.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's in a play about Galileo.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not necessarily
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: Brecht's view.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to know.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it may not necessarily be Brecht's view, but I sort of think it is.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: it expresses maybe Brecht's own communistic view that in the ideal world
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: where there is full equality, no one needs to look up to anybody else.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: No one stands out even.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: No one stands out in that way.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: As I say at one point in the book,
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: in many ways,
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: a world without heroes would be in many ways a very flat and barren one.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: A steady diet of heroes is probably a little too rich,
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: but a world without heroes would be flat and barren.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have to, or I do, I like to think of
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: Great political leaders as fulfilling a heroic function.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not too overly worried about,
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: you know, fears of will this become a, is there something anti-democratic?
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, something idolatrous.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: Idolatrous.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: A world with, we need objects, people to emulate.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is what,
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: and that's what our great Leaders have done,
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: for example,
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: the Puritans who, I mean,
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: examples that I give, the Puritans who landed, they looked to the Hebrew prophets.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: They thought they were establishing a new Jerusalem in the world.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: The American founders looked to the Roman prophets.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: George Washington was the American Cincinnatus.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: Those were their heroes.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: Lincoln looked to Washington.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, everybody, all of our great leaders have used heroic models.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: They have antecedents.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: They have forebears.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: They model themselves.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that sense of continuity and And with a sense that history
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: and traditions provide us with Nietzsche called that monumental history,
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: looking to the past for heroes,
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: looking to the past for monuments of fame to resurrect, to create.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that I think is very important.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: One of the chapter titles in this book on statesmanship is The Art of the Statesman.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: Very nice phrase.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: It reminded me of a story I got from Chris Buckley.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: He was 13 or 14.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_01: And his parents were visiting the Reagans in the governor's mansion in California.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: And Chris was bored and wandered off.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: He was outside.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: And Reagan came out to find him.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: And Chris didn't know what to say or how to make conversation.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: He said, do you miss acting?
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: And Reagan said, well, there's some acting in politics, you know.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes people would say of Reagan, well, how can an actor be governor?
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: Then how can an actor be president?
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: And Reagan just, as modern people say, owned it.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: He'd say, you know, how can you not be an actor and do the job?
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: And a very interesting thing to say and a very interesting, a bold statement, I would say.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, what the hell?
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, many of our great leaders, there's some of, I would say, a reserved nature.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: But a lot of them have flair and a sense of performance.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: FDR, I see clips of him and there are clips, videos.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: What a voice.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: And here's a man sitting down all the while and he was president, couldn't stand.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: And you see pictures of him when he was running for vice presidents,
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: the vice presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: I forget whether that was 20 or 24.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: And he's so handsome.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: He's unbelievably handsome.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then he had all these challenges and struck down physically.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: And still, what a performer.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: I completely agree.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: A short discussion I have near the end of the book is how statesmen deal
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: with failure or tragedy in their own lives.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: And many of the great leaders...
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: Had tragedy of one kind or another,
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: and the way people,
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: and I talk about in Roosevelt's case,
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: he was a person born to privilege in many ways, and yet was struck down with polio.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, some people would have just given in to bitterness about this.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: His prime, yeah.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's the ability to overcome tragedy and overcome misfortune.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: To take other examples, I mean, again,
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'll just use some, I mean, in many ways, Lincoln's career was dogged by failure.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he lost the Senate race, he Many failures.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: He was acutely aware of this,
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: complained about it in some of his private writings,
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: comparing himself to Stephen Douglas,
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: who seemed to have been this huge success,
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: while he says, my life has been one failure after another.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: Difficult
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: marriage, I think.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: Death of a son, I think.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of crisis, a lot of difficulty.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: We can see that the way people respond to, or Churchill had failure.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you if Churchill's life had ended in 1939, say,
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: who would remember who,
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: would be thought of as a massive failure because of the great Gallipoli disaster.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: But it's an ability to I mean,
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: Churchill has a line he's I don't know if it's like a lot of these lines.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: You don't know whether he actually said it or not.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: But you know,
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: He said the definition of success is the ability to go from failure to failure
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: with no intervening loss of confidence.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the kind of ability that a great leader has,
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: both to be able to absorb failure and triumph over it.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_01: You've mentioned de Gaulle.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: This doesn't fall under the category of failure,
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: but it falls under the category of Having something to deal with.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: I find it very touching to read about his love of his Down syndrome daughter.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very moving story.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: Very touching.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: He apparently adored her.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess he was just about the only one she could respond to.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I only learned of this recently within the last 10 years.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'd never known it.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no,
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: that is touching because he was a man of kind of He had,
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: in many ways,
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: he represents in spades the kind of magnanimous character that Aristotle speaks
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: about,
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: his aloofness,
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: his kind of icy personality,
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: his ability to freeze out others, to keep them at arm's length.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: And yet there is this very touching relation he had with his mentally handicapped
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that really shows, again, an inner depth that you don't see in the public.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: Not all.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the other thing is, one of the things I should have said, this kind of touches on it.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to say that while statesmen are heroes,
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: I say, they're not necessarily saints by any means.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: Their many lives are very imperfect.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: Many are flawed in many human ways and often affecting their family life and so on.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: Many have good families, but not all.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: So to say a statesman is a hero is not to say they're a moral saint.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: They're often complex characters.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: Lincoln was a melancholic.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not, you know, Churchill was kind of a dipsomaniac.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: Churchill, de Gaulle was an icy ingrate.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: Margaret Thatcher, who appears in my book, was a scold.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's often a touch of cruelty in their ways they treat people.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't want to say that heroes are necessarily...
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: Saints.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: Don't you love what Lincoln said about Grant's drinking?
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_01: I just love that.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_01: He drinks, people say, well, send a box of his favorite whiskey to the other.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: That was keen of Lincoln.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the other thing, too.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think a sense of humor is also a part of this.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: Not all have it.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: De Gaulle wasn't particularly, but Churchill was.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: What a gift.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: Roosevelt had that gift.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it's an ability,
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: Reagan certainly,
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: you know, Reagan loved jokes and which could be very disarming in that way.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: An important tool in the statesman's.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: Can I give you a comment about Reagan?
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: I thought it was very insightful.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: It came from Norman Podhoretz.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: It goes with what we're talking about.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: So Clark Clifford famously described Reagan or infamously described Reagan as an amiable dunce.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: And Norman said, well, I think people now recognize that he was no dunce.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: But also, he wasn't all that amiable.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: A very interesting remark.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: Reagan was a cool customer in many respects.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's...
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think the job requires a kind of aloofness from friends,
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: from comrades, from those closest to you.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: You have to either by nature or through cultivation, cultivate an air of distance between you.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: Nietzsche spoke of a pathos of distance, which I thought was a beautiful expression.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: All of the great leaders had that.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_00: To take a kind of counter example to that, We're talking about Bill Clinton earlier.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: Clinton's famous lines was, I feel your pain.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: He had a great ability to kind of identify with,
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_00: the audience that he was speaking to,
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_00: to create a sense of immediacy and kind of intimacy,
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: even probably kind of a false intimacy.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: But it did suggest that.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas I think our greatest leaders are those who have put a little bit of distance
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_00: between themselves and their publics and cultivate an aura around them,
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: which is not just one of the boys or one of the girls.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: There is a kind of standoffishness that I think is-
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's something about Clinton
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: that I find somewhat touching and I can even relate to it.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: It was said of him by one of his Aides,
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think that Clint would enter a room of 100 people, 99 adored him and one didn't.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: He'd spend the whole night with the one who didn't,
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: working on him, the whole night, because it bothered him so.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: Very interesting.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's one reason why I could never run for a political office,
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: because if one person voted against me, it would be devastating.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_01: I hear you.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: Another of your chapter titles is The Ethics of Statecraft.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a good amount of Machiavellian here.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I wanted to ask you,
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: another of our favorite guests on this program is your fellow professor
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: of political philosophy, Harvey Mansfield, who thinks so well of Machiavelli.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder, do you, I mean, Albus, you have great respect for him as a thinker.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's not what I'm talking about.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: I love Harvey, and we would probably disagree very much about this.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: But that's why I brought it up, because I could tell from your writing about, yeah.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: Teach a course on Machiavelli.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: He's very important to any serious student of political philosophy.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: But I do not hold him up as an image of what the statesman should be.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_00: Machiavelli speaks,
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: Machiavelli,
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: let me just say,
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_00: first of all,
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_00: Machiavelli speaks in many different It's almost impossible to pin him down.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_00: So naturally what I'm going to say in a minute is looking at him from a particular angle.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: But a famous image that Machiavelli uses in The Prince to describe his ideal prince,
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_00: his ideal political leader, he describes him as an armed prophet.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: Prince must be,
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_00: must be a prophet in some ways,
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: must be the bearer,
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: must be almost Like a quasi-religious figure, but armed to the teeth.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is not the model of the political leader I want to endorse.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: Machiavelli's armed prophet is a revolutionary.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: A revolutionary who's willing to use any,
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_00: as his famous phrase, any means necessary to achieve their goals.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_00: And in many ways he gives rise to-
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: Does that come from Machiavelli?
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_00: I never knew that.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: Or popularized by him, maybe.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: Popularized by him.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure that phrase.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_01: I associate it with Malcolm X centuries later.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a Machiavellian sentiment.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, absolutely.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: That the prince should use any means.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: You have to use deception, trickery, whatever it takes to achieve their goals.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, that is not the model of statecraft that I want to promote.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: The statesman,
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: there is a chapter on the ethics of the statesman,
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_00: and it does go back to something we talked about earlier in the conversation.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: It has to do with an ethic of restraint,
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: a sense of proportion, a sense that not all things are permissible.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_00: There are some things you don't do.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: Precisely.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'll just give you an example of that.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I'm probably drawing too heavily from Lincoln,
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: but he's just a offspring of examples of this.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: In the summer of 1864, Lincoln was certain he was going to be a one-term president.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: Things were not going well in the war.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: He was being challenged by McClellan, who was going to be the Democratic candidate.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: He was even being Undermined by people within his own cabinet and his own party.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it was proposed to him that,
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_00: you know, we're in the middle of a civil war and we've never had anything like this.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: The elections should be postponed, canceled or postponed.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: And Lincoln said,
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: under no circumstances,
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: even if the result of the election is to overturn everything I have stood for,
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_00: he wrote, I'm not quoting him, but I'm careful.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sentiment, even if it were overturned,
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: It would not be worth it.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_00: It would not be worth it to overthrow or to postpone a free election.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, fortunately, things turned around quickly in the late summer, in the autumn of 1864.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sherman's, in particular, Sherman's defeat of Atlanta and the war began to take a strong turn.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_00: Lincoln was elected in a landslide.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: But he said he understood that not all things are possible.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_00: Even in a moment of supreme crisis,
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_00: he operated with an inner sense of restraint and a sense of, again,
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: to use a Max Weber term, a sense of proportion, which Weber thought was important.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I do talk in that chapter, I use Weber's idea of what he called an ethic of responsibility.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: The statesman is responsible not only for the things that he has,
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: he's responsible to himself or herself.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that requires a sense of moderation and a sense of there are limits to what you can do.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is a very un-Machiavellian kind of sentiment.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you would say a word about three types,
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_01: a chapter title is The Prophet, The technocrat and the demagogue.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I tell you,
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_01: I must say that in this populist era of ours,
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: I've become warmer to so-called technocrats.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: I know that people use this word as a, usually use this word as a put down.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: A friend of mine said something interesting.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: He was sort of disgusted by populism that day.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, you know, technocratic.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, what they mean is competent.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: You've cited Machiavelli's armed prophet.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: We have the technocrat, then we have the demagogue.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's an interesting point,
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: Jay, you make about sometimes a good, competent technocrat is what you need.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: Looks okay to me now.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_01: And if he's boring, all the better.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: I've had enough excitement.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: One example from our recent past, Michael Bloomberg.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_00: What a good mayor.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: What a good mayor.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_01: Ed Koch said so, which was big of him.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_01: What a good mayor he was.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: On this program, Koch said that.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_01: Very blunt.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_01: It was a wonderful mayor.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_00: Surprisingly magnanimous for the Mayor Koch.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_00: A friend of mine likes to tell a story that after Koch was, was he defeated?
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_00: I forget.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: No, he didn't run.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he lost to Dinkins in a primary.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_01: Lost to Dinkins.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's what it was.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: And my friend tells me that...
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_00: Koch was speaking at their synagogue and a member of the congregation said,
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_00: oh, Mayor Koch, we want you to run again or something like that.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_00: And Koch said, no, the people have spoken and now they must be punished for it.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: So there you go.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, the technocrat, those were my kind of faux statesmen, as it were.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the book is partly a little piece of...
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a philosopher at heart,
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_00: so I like distinctions,
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_00: and I wanted to distinguish the statesmen from other notable kinds
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: of political leaders, but I think ones that are often confused with the state.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: We've talked a little bit about the profit and the tendency of the profit
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: in politics to move in a kind of revolutionary direction.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_00: Profits are usually...
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen, would Lenin qualify?
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: These are often political moralists who want to reform or not even reform,
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: revolutionize society with grand visions of what is possible,
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_00: which usually almost always are followed by violence and terrorism and chaos.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_00: So the prophets are dangerous models.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: Less dangerous,
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: of course,
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: but Familiar is,
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_00: again, the technocrat, which is the kind of view, and I agree with what you say.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you want, sometimes the moment calls for just a good, competent administrator.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think of Mark Carney in Canada, who may be a little bit more than that, though.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_00: But there is an ideology that,
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: I call it an ideology,
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_00: that sort of regards politics as a kind of Technical activity that can
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_00: or is best overseen by experts and technocracy brings with it this kind of
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_00: deference
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_00: to rule of experts in some sense,
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_00: a kind of managerialism that is often regarded as sort of the source of
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_00: the administrative state and the deep state,
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_00: that these administrative politics takes on a life of its own.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_00: And comes to replace really the processes of constitutionalism.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: Steven, there's a famous book I haven't read,
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: most famous books I haven't read,
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_01: but it's The Managerial Revolution by James Burnham.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_01: Is this about that?
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, absolutely, 100%.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: In fact,
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: I had a student two years ago who wrote a brilliant senior essay on that book,
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_00: on Burnham and that book.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, interestingly, Burnham was a, when he wrote that book, he was a recovering Trotskyite.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yes.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: In many ways,
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: the critique of managerialism or bureaucracy was equally,
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: that was in many ways a property of the left at that time.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_00: Trotsky's thought Stalin had created this bureaucratic state and
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_00: the Revolutionary politics was opposed to this kind
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_00: of sterile administrative doctrine.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, Burnham certainly was a part of that.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_00: Today we tend to think of the critique of managerialism and so on has kind of moved
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_00: to the right in some ways.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: But I do think that they're on to this idea that the statesman can be a kind of
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_00: Scientific expert, or at least someone who simply implements the ideas of science.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen,
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_01: you know a heck of a lot about France,
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: and you are a Francophone and Francophile, I think.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_01: Is this school and famous school in Paris guilty of that,
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: the one they all graduate from, you know, Chirac and the rest?
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_00: The science, the school, the
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_00: Ecole d' .
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's what its purpose was,
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_00: was to create a kind of a educated technocrats who could,
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_00: who would run the, who would- Run the state.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_00: Who hold the levers of government.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_00: The last chapter,
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_00: just to kind of jump ahead a long way,
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_00: asks the question, you know, whether we can educate any longer for statesmen.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I can consider, again,
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_00: a proposal that goes back to George Washington and met several
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_00: of our early presidents.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_00: Should we have had a national university?
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_00: The purpose of which is the education of statesmen.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: That was something Washington,
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_00: the first six presidents all included some reference to a national university
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_00: in their various speeches.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, then it never happened.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been in places like the French model that you just mentioned.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's been in many ways a mixed blessing.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's created a kind of What was to create a kind of an enlightened class
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: of public administrators is often created a kind of inward looking elite
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_00: that just perpetuates itself.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah,
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: the technocrat,
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_00: the manager,
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_00: the administrator,
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_00: that's another second form of leadership model that I think is distinct from
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_00: the statesman.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_00: And let me just say a word about the third that came up and that's the demagogue.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_00: Demagogue, the Caesarist, is often true.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_00: The demagogue is a bit different from the prophet, as I see it.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: Prophets, political prophets, are carriers or bearers of ideology.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_00: They believe stuff, right, Stephen?
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: The demagogue is closer to what we might call today a cult of personality.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: It figures the only standard is the sort of The only standard is the charisma of
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_00: the leader, of the ruler.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's no content,
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_00: there's no particular content to it other than the personality of the leader
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_00: who is able to bewitch and to bewilder simply by force of personality alone.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we are more than familiar with that particular kind of leader.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: Often thought until recently had sort of been banished,
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_00: but all of these models are there and they recur and come back.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: I believe this is true,
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen,
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_01: that Franklin Roosevelt was maybe the most gifted politician of the 20th century
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_01: in America.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: I believe it's true.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_01: There was one politician and one politician only he feared, Huey Long.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because he knew the power of populism.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_01: FDR was pretty good at that game himself with economic royalists and so on.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I believe that Long was murdered before the 36 campaign.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_01: So FDR wasn't challenged.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_01: But that's interesting for FDR to have feared a politician in his own party.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_00: I hadn't really thought of that one.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I have read that.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that's absolutely correct.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_01: I want to ask you about something before we get to Lincoln, return to Lincoln.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: There's some wonderful passages in your book about honor, the concept of honor.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_01: And in my notes here, I thought of two things.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_01: One, Falstaff, the Verity opera based on Shakespeare.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's this wonderful riff, l'honore, he says, ladri, he says, thieves.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the most cynical sort of blast against honor.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's so cynical.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I sympathize with that to a degree.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_01: But then, you know, there's honorable senses of honor.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I just wanted to give you a little vignette.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_01: It was in the 2000 during the presidential cycle of 2000.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_01: And some of us were gathered.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, it was Bill Buckley's living room.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about the McCain candidacy.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_01: So what's it about the candidacy of John McCain?
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_01: And someone who was there, John Podhorett, said honor.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: And this was necessary after the Clinton years,
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_01: some of us thought, but we hadn't seen anything yet.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_01: Clinton now looks at me like some kind of ideal, but that's interesting.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_01: And you and I both think a lot of a book by Lampedusa, The Leopard.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I was in Palermo this summer and you have been in Palermo and you You tell
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: a story related to honor, and I wonder if you would tell it here on the podcast.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you for giving me that opportunity.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_01: And say whatever else about honor you wish, Stephen.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not limiting you.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: I do think of the belief in honor,
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: which connected to this role,
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_00: this notion of magnanimity that we were speaking about.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's an important belief.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: Motivation of statesmanship.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_00: They're lovers of honor.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're lovers of kind of,
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_00: and they have a kind of honorable ambition,
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_00: which is difficult in a way to define or to limit,
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_00: but there is an important role of honor.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_00: It seems in many ways,
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_00: like magnanimity or like so many other things, kind of an antiquated ideal.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_00: Belongs to a kind of medieval world of hierarchy and difference,
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_00: you know, vertical differences between classes and so on.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: But honor still remains an important part of our modern democratic life.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll just make a shout out to a book that I very much admire and a colleague
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_00: at another university.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_00: Sharon Krause from Brown University wrote a beautiful book.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was called Liberalism with Honor,
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_00: or maybe it was just Liberal Honor,
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_00: talking about the way in which honor continues and is required in liberal societies.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_00: We still have honor codes, maybe more often honored in the breach.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_00: We have- Oath of honor, wonderful phrase.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_00: Talk about things like someone gets honorable mention.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_00: So the term still has some meaning for it.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't, it's not simply arcane, but the example you gave is wonderful.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_00: It was from, you know, we were a number of years ago.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_00: We were, my wife and I were, it was really a great honor.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_00: We were at the home of,
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_00: Tomasi Lanza,
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_00: who was the nephew and in the literary executor
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_00: of his great uncle Giuseppe de Lampedusa in Palermo,
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_00: the author of The Leopard,
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_00: and we were at their home with their palazzo,
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_00: bright and beautiful in Palermo where Lampedusa had lived, the
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_00: The home had been destroyed in World War II and bombing,
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_00: but it had since been restored and rebuilt.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was really beautiful.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_00: And we were sitting down to dinner.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_00: We were a group of people.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the principessa, the wife, runs a cooking school.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_00: We were in a cooking school in Polaro.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_00: And whose staff provided the meal and served the meal,
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_00: she was sitting down and she asked, is there an Omo Donori who will sit next to her?
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_00: An Omo Donori, is there a man of honor?
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_00: It felt like something out of a godfather or something.
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, that's wonderful.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I'm happy to fulfill that role I took the seat there for.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_00: But there was something kind of beautifully medieval about it, you know, a man of honor.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine kind of an American saying such a thing?
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_00: I had to get that story.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's wonderful.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Stephen B. Smith, I've been accused of being a kind of Lincoln groupie guilty.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_01: George Will said on this podcast that he regards Lincoln as the greatest statesman
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_01: of the modern era, leaving out the Middle Ages in antiquity.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I myself am not much of a, I don't really do, I'm not a ranker.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_01: I don't really do rankings, or at least I say I don't.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes I do, but I'm awfully glad he was there.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I guess I'm slightly uncomfortable with the word providential,
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_01: but I'm willing to say that it was good he was there when he was there.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I know you agree.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_01: And what a writer, my goodness, what a writer.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_00: Saul Bellow once said in my hearing that Lincoln was the greatest prose stylist,
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_00: the greatest American prose stylist,
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_00: which is an amazing statement for a Nobel Prize in literature.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that I do want to say about Lincoln's camp came up
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_00: a little bit earlier when we were talking about where we are now and Are there going
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_00: to be statesmen of the future?
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, history is unpredictable.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_00: And take Lincoln, for example.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_00: Would anybody in 1860?
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_01: Not in a million years.
• 1:08:07
  SPEAKER_00: Not in a million years.
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_00: Never would have thought.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_00: Never.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_00: And yet he had the confidence that allowed him not only to rise but to master the occasions.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_00: And we never know when that might happen again.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure it will.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure it will.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's one thing that prevents me from despair because I do think
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_00: history is so unpredictable.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know who is out there right now who will rise.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe somebody who would never have thought of,
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_00: just in the way that Lincoln would never have been.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I'll go back to De Gaulle.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody had any idea who De Gaulle was.
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody.
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_00: He was a military officer.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_00: He had no public visibility.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_00: People didn't even,
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_00: when he When he spoke over the BBC from England,
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_00: people didn't even know, they didn't believe that was his name.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_00: De Gaulle was a made-up name.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yet through force of his personality and through force of his intellect, he created Free France.
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_00: He created...
• 1:09:29
  SPEAKER_00: In many ways,
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_00: the French Constitution that later on,
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_00: the Fifth Republic that we have today that is still in existence today.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_00: So nobody would have ever thought that.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_00: one
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_00: lesson of the book is perhaps that statesmen of the future are still possible.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it is by no means over.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_01: We were discussing Churchill,
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen,
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_01: and I remember a professor,
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Ernest R.
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_01: May told his class that Winston Churchill in the late 1930s,
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think was,
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_01: I remember what Professor May said,
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_01: a figure of sport,
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_01: an object of ridicule,
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_01: thought it was kind of a buffoon,
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_01: a relic, sort of passed it, and cometh the hour, cometh the man.
• 1:10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, here toward the end, I have about three more for you, Stephen B. Smith.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to ask you about a couple of statesmen, one ancient and one modern.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned them both in your book.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Bill Buckley had this phrase, I rip off this phrase, he'd say, Periclean ideal.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he's not exactly some Periclean ideal.
• 1:10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Pericles has the reputation of being great.
• 1:10:57
  SPEAKER_01: I know just about nothing about the man.
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_01: Was he in fact great?
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think so.
• 1:11:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's a debate about that.
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_00: There is about everything.
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Most of what I have come to admire about Pericles
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_00: was due in part to reading Don Kagan's,
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_00: the great Don Kagan,
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_00: historian at Yale, his book, his biography of Pericles, Pericles of Athens.
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I, every year I We teach Thucydides and we read the famous funeral oration.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_00: But the biography gives a much fuller picture of the man and his influence.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_00: And in many ways,
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Pericles,
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_00: even if we just went by the famous funeral oration by itself,
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_00: this is another example of the power of language.
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Tell people what they stand for.
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's given at a time Although it's at the very beginning of the war between
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_00: the Athenians and the Spartans,
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_00: there's the first casualties have come in that Athenians are beginning to kind
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_00: of get cold feet about the adventure and so on.
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And his speech is an attempt in many ways to rally the troops.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what we stand for.
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_00: And here's an example of a person,
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_00: you know, who very much, you might say, governed By the power of language.
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_00: And Ukrainian democracy was nothing if not a regime, a society that elevated speech.
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_01: Bill Buckley prized words.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I think for me in the ancient world,
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_00: at least for the ancient world, Pericles is my model of a great statesman.
• 1:12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Not exactly a constitutional statesman.
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Athens wasn't exactly a constitutional republic in the way that we would understand the term.
• 1:13:07
  SPEAKER_00: But I do think Pericles comes as close.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember when I was in college,
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_00: standard essay topic that people were we were asked to write was to compare
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_00: the two great funeral orations and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to compare the two.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_00: And of course,
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_00: you were always supposed to say Lincoln got the better,
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Lincoln's was the better one.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_00: But they both used these occasions,
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_00: solemn state occasions,
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_00: to reaffirm the values of their societies and really showed,
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_00: once again, showed the power of words to immortalize.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Lincoln says, you know, they will little note nor long remember what we say here.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_00: They will long remember what they did here.
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_00: But Lincoln knew that was exactly the opposite.
• 1:14:00
  SPEAKER_00: People will forget quickly what was done unless what was done is immortalized in language.
• 1:14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what he did.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_01: I know that you admire Lincoln's eulogy of Henry Clay,
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_01: which has so much to say about freedom and liberalism, doesn't it?
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_00: His whole idea of a statesman, he said, about Clay.
• 1:14:24
  SPEAKER_00: He loved his country, not because it was his own country, but because it was a free country.
• 1:14:30
  SPEAKER_00: So he showed that Clay, I mean,
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_00: whether that was Clay or Lincoln's view,
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_00: he said that,
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_00: in other words,
• 1:14:40
  SPEAKER_00: there was to his patriotism, his love of country, a kind of philosophical basis.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_00: He loved it not just because it was his own, but because it represented an idea.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_00: It represented freedom.
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_01: One more statesman.
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_01: I want to give you a memory.
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_01: I thought a lot of Paul Johnson, the British historian.
• 1:14:58
  SPEAKER_01: He was a friend of mine and I loved him.
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I have a painting by him at home here that he gave me that relates to music.
• 1:15:06
  SPEAKER_01: I asked him once in a public forum, who's a great statesman of our times?
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_01: And he said he gave an answer that to me was slightly disquieting.
• 1:15:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd like to know what you, you mentioned him in your book Lee Kuan Yew.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Who founded Singapore.
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now, there are authoritarian aspects there.
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_01: But Paul thought that Lee Kuan Yew had achieved something great.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I figure that's true, but I must say I know very little about it.
• 1:15:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder if you'd comment.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Let me say first about Paul Johnson.
• 1:15:44
  SPEAKER_00: I never met him.
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a great admirer of his book Heroes, which I've used before.
• 1:15:51
  SPEAKER_00: And a wonderful little Character sketches of,
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:15:56
  SPEAKER_00: great figures from biblical times to the present and really wonderful writer.
• 1:16:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I do mention Lee Kuan Yew and he's not someone, he's not exactly a constitutionalist.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you what kind of turned me on this.
• 1:16:16
  SPEAKER_00: I had the privilege of
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Going a couple of times to Singapore when there was a joint Yale-Singapore University.
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's since stopped operation, but it was called Yale NUS.
• 1:16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yale, the National University of Singapore, created this joint university.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_00: It was the only basically liberal arts college in Asia.
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_00: So it was very impressive, but it didn't last, unfortunately.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I was there a couple of times and I was enormously impressed with the country.
• 1:16:53
  SPEAKER_00: And when I spoke to students and when I spoke to professors and other family members
• 1:17:00
  SPEAKER_00: of students who lived there, I really admired the way.
• 1:17:05
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't exactly a constitutional government,
• 1:17:09
  SPEAKER_00: but it wasn't just a kind of It
• 1:17:14
  SPEAKER_01: wasn't a thugocracy.
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Not at all.
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_00: It was not one of these kleptocratic regimes like you'd see in Russia or other.
• 1:17:27
  SPEAKER_00: There was a great ethos of public service in the country.
• 1:17:33
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of mandatory.
• 1:17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Students would go to university.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was completely paid for by the government.
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_00: But then they were required,
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think,
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_00: to do three years or so, usually of some kind of public service back to the state.
• 1:17:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I became a great admirer of what Lee Kuan Yew had done.
• 1:17:53
  SPEAKER_00: I found it a very admirable society.
• 1:17:57
  SPEAKER_00: One of the last polis in the world.
• 1:17:59
  SPEAKER_00: It really was a little polis society of some kind,
• 1:18:03
  SPEAKER_00: which had, interestingly, both elements of both Athens and Sparta.
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_00: There was a kind of Athenian grandeur and wealth, a very wealthy society.
• 1:18:17
  SPEAKER_00: And yet there was a kind of Spartan ethos of, there was a kind of collectivist ethos too in it.
• 1:18:27
  SPEAKER_00: I remember I had a colleague here, since retired, who went there, and he was a big lefty.
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_00: And he was invited to Singapore,
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_00: and he asked his host, Could you show me the like the worst slum?
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_00: He wanted to see like the worst of Singapore.
• 1:18:45
  SPEAKER_00: He was taken to this housing complex.
• 1:18:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, you know, most Americans would, you know, be thrilled to live in such a place.
• 1:18:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a very they've maintained an extraordinary standard of living for their society.
• 1:19:02
  SPEAKER_00: And even if it's not Perfectly democratic, okay, you know.
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Another, if you want a quick read on Lee Kuan Yew, there is a very nice chapter on him.
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_00: Henry Kissinger thought very highly of him.
• 1:19:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think it may have been Kissinger's last book.
• 1:19:21
  SPEAKER_00: It was simply called Leadership and a series of profiles of great figures with
• 1:19:27
  SPEAKER_00: whom he had dealt in his career.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a wonderful chapter, very readable book.
• 1:19:34
  SPEAKER_00: Very interesting book full of personal anecdotes and you learn a lot of history too.
• 1:19:38
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a very nice chapter on Lee Kuan Yew in that.
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Stephen B. Smith,
• 1:19:44
  SPEAKER_01: here at the end,
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_01: I've saved a touchy subject for the end here, but a very important one.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_01: You have some beautiful pages on American exceptionalism involving Tocqueville
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_01: and others, wonderful pages.
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_01: My faith in, belief in American exceptionalism has been waning.
• 1:20:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder if you can buck me up or not.
• 1:20:12
  SPEAKER_01: Say whatever you like about this idea of American exceptionalism, which trips from so many lips.
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure that all of us who use the phrase really understand what we're talking about.
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Nor I understand.
• 1:20:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I know, especially in academia, American exceptional is a very unpopular topic.
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I would think, yeah.
• 1:20:39
  SPEAKER_00: And at some level,
• 1:20:41
  SPEAKER_00: when you dig down many of the things that we think is exceptional,
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_00: you can find replicated in other places.
• 1:20:47
  SPEAKER_00: I get it.
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_00: There is a way in which the concept can be misused as anything.
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_00: Of course.
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_00: And yet I think it is our...
• 1:21:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a little bit hesitant to put it this way, but I'll say it.
• 1:21:07
  SPEAKER_00: I believe in many ways it is our foundational myth.
• 1:21:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you go back to the founders, their belief that they were...
• 1:21:15
  SPEAKER_00: Creating something new and something different.
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_01: Even the colonists before the founders.
• 1:21:21
  SPEAKER_00: Before them, yes.
• 1:21:22
  SPEAKER_00: But Hamilton says in Federalist One,
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_00: on the first page,
• 1:21:27
  SPEAKER_00: we're going to prove that society doesn't have to rely on accident and chance,
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_00: but can be created through reflection and choice.
• 1:21:36
  SPEAKER_00: This will be a different kind of society than others that have been You know,
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_00: others in the past.
• 1:21:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I still feel a sense of
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_00: a little bit, it's a little bit like the joke about free will.
• 1:21:55
  SPEAKER_00: Someone's, the philosophers asked, do you believe in free will?
• 1:21:58
  SPEAKER_00: He says, of course I do.
• 1:21:59
  SPEAKER_00: I have no choice.
• 1:22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Wonderful quip.
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_00: A little bit like that about American exceptionalism.
• 1:22:06
  SPEAKER_00: Of course I believe in it.
• 1:22:07
  SPEAKER_00: We have no choice.
• 1:22:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's frayed.
• 1:22:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's frayed without a doubt.
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_00: But we have to think that.
• 1:22:20
  SPEAKER_00: We have to regard ourselves,
• 1:22:22
  SPEAKER_00: I still think,
• 1:22:24
  SPEAKER_00: as an exceptional people who are engaged in a mission of That will be a kind
• 1:22:32
  SPEAKER_00: of lamp unto the nations in some ways in the way that Reagan said,
• 1:22:39
  SPEAKER_00: you know, a city on the hill.
• 1:22:41
  SPEAKER_00: I have to believe that.
• 1:22:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am Jay Nordlinger for Q&A.
• 1:22:47
  SPEAKER_01: We've been hearing from Professor Stephen B. Smith.
• 1:22:50
  SPEAKER_01: This book is on statesmanship.
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_01: It is expensive to go to Yale,
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_01: but you can certainly buy this book and it's a Wonderful education in politics,
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_01: in history, in political theory.
• 1:23:06
  SPEAKER_01: There are stories.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's really rich.
• 1:23:11
  SPEAKER_01: What a wonderful student and teacher you are, Stephen.
• 1:23:15
  SPEAKER_01: One has to be both, I think.
• 1:23:17
  SPEAKER_01: You keep learning and you impart to others what you've learned.
• 1:23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're too kind.
• 1:23:22
  SPEAKER_00: You really are.
• 1:23:23
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 1:23:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I look forward to our next conversation.
• 1:23:27
  SPEAKER_00: I too.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_01: In the meantime, so long, everyone.
• 1:23:31
  SPEAKER_01: See you next time.