Symposium

I talk with University of Pennsylvania’s Damon Linker about teaching American government while our political system is rapidly being dismantled. We discuss the growing gap between the theory and the practice of American government, reasons for pessimism and optimism, and whether young people think the politics of the Trump era is just normal.

You can also watch the video here.

In light of the flagrant abuse of the FCC to shut down Donald Trump’s critics, I also recommend going back to check out a previous interview with Paul Matzko about how the FCC’s powers have frequently been abused. We really saw this coming and explained it all months before it happened.

Speaking of explaining what’s happening, check out my new book, Dictator From Day One: How Donald Trump Is Overthrowing the Constitution and How to Fight Back, described by Damon Linker as “journalism of a very high order” and by Steven Pinker as “the best short summary of how Trump is turning the US into a dictatorship.”Get it on Amazon here.

I talk to Paul Matzko who works on technology and abundance issues for the Institute for Human Studies. We examine the history of the FCC and its broad and vague power, the abuse of “news distortion” to distort the news, why the FCC wins even when it loses in court, how each side of our political debate keeps creating the precedents that are used against it—and the “original sin” on which the FCC was founded.

This is a really in-depth discussion and will open your eyes to how serious the problem is and how much of it precedes the current administration. See also the study Paul co-authored a few years ago with highlights from the long history of the political abuse of the FCC. What’s happening now is objectively worse than before—but boy, have we been asking for it.

You can also watch the interview here:

We spend some time addressing the FCC’s role in Donald Trump’s shakedown of CBS, which has since moved one step forward with the resignation of the head of CBS News, following the resignation of the main producer at “60 Minutes.”

The president of CBS News, Wendy McMahon, was forced out of her post on Monday, the latest shock wave to hit the news division amid an ongoing showdown involving President Trump, “60 Minutes” and CBS’s parent company, Paramount….

Ms. McMahon’s critics also believed that the reporting at “60 Minutes” had become politically biased, exposing the company to unnecessary criticism. And it was clear that Mr. Trump was paying close attention.

The example of “political bias” given here is “60 Minutes” accurately reporting on the lawlessness of Trump’s attacks on law firms.

Yet Trump has now successfully used the power of the FCC—along with other regulatory agencies, particularly the Federal Trade Commission—to neutralize one of the most famous and influential bastions of investigative journalism. And you can see him following up on this by threatening ABC News over its coverage of his giant $400 million bribe from the Emir of Qatar.

This is a power that needs to be taken away as soon as possible, to protect us from this president, but also so no future president from either party can use it.

I talk to Peter Shane, distinguished scholar in residence at NYU. We examine the "unitary executive theory," the long Anglo-American tradition of dividing and limiting executive power, how to have government do big things without becoming tyrannical, and how he would recommend amending the Constitution.

See his article on Unitary Executive Theory at The UnPopulist.

Or watch the interview here:

I don’t know what’s going on with the lighting, but in this case, the orange man is good.

The Library of Who?

One of the issues we talk about here that is not in Peter Shane’s previous article is that of course executive power cannot be unitary because each of the other branches of government has executive functions that must be under its own control.

The judiciary needs to build and maintain courthouses and hire bailiffs and pay the salaries of judges—and if all that is totally dependent on the president, if the judiciary has no independent executive functions, then it will have no independence as a branch of government.

Just after I recorded this interview, we got the best example: Trump trying to take over the Library of Congress. As I put it at The UnPopulist, “The question of who controls the Library of Congress would seem to be answered in the name itself: It is the Library of Congress.” And this is not a minor issue, because the Library of Congress also serves as the research arm for the legislature. This is another case in which an independent branch of government, the legislature, must be able to have independent executive functions, or it forfeits its ability to function.

I keep hammering this, because the unitary executive has a strangely devoted following among even the sane and reasonable classical liberals—but if this theory is taken to its logical conclusion, it results in a unitary government with only one branch and one man. It is a theory of autocracy.

A Note on the Future

Symposium has not been very active lately, for a number of reasons. First, it has been a victim of its own success, which is to say that it yielded so many opportunities for me to do things at other publications that I had less time for this one. And Symposium was also designed to be nonpartisan and avoid electoral politics, which is not entirely compatible with the current political environment.

More deeply, my original idea for this publication was to draw people together for conversations across the political aisle. And in the Biden administration, or in the first term of a Kamala Harris administration, that would have been a productive and appropriate undertaking.

But for reasons I have detailed elsewhere, we are in a fundamental crisis, a constitutional collapse that is changing our basic system of government. In these circumstances, there aren’t two sides of the aisle. There are only pro-democracy publications—and everyone else.

So this will simply be a pro-democracy publication, and the interview above is the beginning of a series of podcasts on the threats to democracy, how to revive it, the basic cultural reforms that are needed to protect it, and how we can amend the system to make it stronger.

I talk with Chelsea Follett, managing editor of HumanProgress.org and author of Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World. We talk about why cities have been the centers of progress, the conditions that make bursts of innovation possible, and examples of open and dynamic societies from Amsterdam to Dubrovnik to Mohenjo-Daro.

You can view the video of this conversation here.

I talk with New York Times columnist David French about how he got canceled by his own church—see his Times column about that. We also talk about the growing problem of partisanship and intolerance in conservative institutions, the crisis of American Christianity, and the reasonable “center” that we need to hold together.

You can view the video of this conversation here.

The Mote and the Beam

We spend part of this conversation talking about various sex scandals within the church, and referring to it as a crisis. Here’s what I mean by that.

If were a more bitter and militant atheist, I could run a whole blog cataloguing one horrific example after another. David mentions Ravi Zacharias, but I was thinking about Paul Pressler, the architect of a conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention who it turns out was abusing his power to make homosexual advances on young men.

I also recently saw the news about one of the Trump’s so-called “spiritual advisors,” a megachurch pastor who confessed to having an affair and being forgiven for it by the church—but now it has been revealed that his victim was 12 years old.

Remember that the right has been spinning QAnon fantasies about left-wing politics being a cover for the sexual abuse of children—yet a steady drumbeat of these stories keeps coming out about conservative Christians. Another Southern Baptist Convention conservative was just arrested “after an investigation revealed that he allegedly used cryptocurrency to purchase child sex abuse material.”

As they’ve been saying online: Somehow, it’s never a drag queen.

Then there’s the Republican State Representative in Michigan arrested “after alleged altercation with a stripper involving a firearm.”

Meanwhile conservative Christian are very eager to protect themselves from this:

With glowing performance reviews and above-average student evaluations, by most measures Matthew Warner’s first year as a communications professor at Grace College was a triumph.

But he spent most of that first year knowing it could be his last. After four months on the job, Warner was informed by the school’s president, Drew Flamm, that the board had “come to the conclusion that we don’t think it works out to move forward,” according to a recording obtained by Religion News Service.

Warner’s termination is the latest in a string of professor terminations at Christian colleges seemingly tied to clashes over narrowing and often unspoken political and theological criteria. While Flamm didn’t specify the reasons for Warner’s dismissal, it was preceded by an online termination campaign clear about its goals. Launched by conservative influencers and Grace College stakeholders, the campaign demanded Warner’s removal due to his social media posts about LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter, and critiques of the GOP.

This is exactly what I mean by “conservative cancel culture.” It’s the exact process conservatives have complained about when it comes from the left, but used in their own institutions to impose their own orthodoxy.

In our conversation above, we spend a little time trading Bible verses. I think perhaps conservative Christians ought to give more thought to Matthew 7:3: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

I talk with Renée DiResta, formerly of the Stanford Internet Observatory and author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality.

We talk about the canceling of the Stanford Internet Observatory, why “misinformation” isn’t the right term for the Internet rumor mill, the power of “counterspeech” and why suspending social media accounts doesn’t work, how an “army of Davids” turned into an army of volunteer propagandists—and the curious imaginary life of “CIA Renée.”You can view the video of this conversation here.

A Culture of Truth

In our conversation, we discuss an article by an intern at The Free Press who used to be an intern at the Stanford Internet Observatory, which makes some dubious and highly inaccurate claims about what goes on there. (The intern did not work at the SIO until 2022 yet claims she was tasked with suppressing the 2020 story about Hunter Biden’s laptop—an issue outside the scope of the program’s focus.)

The Free Press seems to exist for the primary purpose of giving semi-respectable cover to far-right talking points. But this incident (and other things I’ve read at The Free Press) remind me of my final days at The Federalist, when it was already taking on the character of what others have described as an “intern blog,” in which very young and inexperienced right-wing activists pen poorly thought-out hot takes—like denouncing the universally beloved Dolly Parton as a false prophet.

The main thing is that this is done without adult supervision, with minimal and uncritical editing. I see something of the same thing at The Free Press in publishing claims about the Stanford Internet Observatory that fit the preferred right-wing narrative but don’t stand up to fact checking or critical scrutiny.

This underscores a point I bring up at the end of the podcast above. We need a “culture of free speech” that values pluralism and vigorous debate. But the point of a culture of free speech is that it encourages the kind of wide-ranging discussion that allows us to get at the truth. It needs to be paired with a culture of truth—a culture that values factual accuracy and careful reasoning.

That is precisely what is missing from the Internet rumor mill DiResta describes.

I talk with writer Alysia Ames about her coinage of the “Omnicause,” a tendency to absorb all left-of-center causes in one giant package deal.

We also talk about the challenges for advocates of liberalism in rural areas—a closely related issue, because if you’ve got to back every cause in order to promote any cause, you’re going to encounter a lot more resistance.But first we talk about how women’s work in the household has historically been unaccounted for—in the most literal sense—and how the necessity of recognizing its value explains a lot about our current culture wars over gender, as well as the decline in fertility in the developed world

You can view the video of this conversation here.

Identity and Dogma

On a related note, I just posted at my personal newsletter an examination of the collapse of the Libertarian Party as it heads into a fractious convention that seems likely to wreck the whole party even more.

I lay the blame in part on the longstanding philosophical agnosticism of the libertarians, who in an effort to build a big tent ended up not having the intellectual guardrails to keep their movement from being co-opted by authoritarian nationalists. To be sure, the conservative movement arguably had more philosophical substance and still didn’t succeed in getting swept up in the mass hysteria of Trumpism. But at least they were trying.

It strikes me that this and the Omnicause are two sides of the same issue. Any cultural movement or political organization has to have some core of ideas and values—while also making accommodations for reasonable disagreement and heterodoxy. It has to have an identity without having a dogma.

The Libertarians and the Omnicause represent the two different ways a movement can fail at doing this.

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I talk with Ruy Teixeira of The Liberal Patriot about how the left and Democrats lost rural voters, and how they can try to get them back.

We talk about the history of political realignments, the parallels to the fate of Republicans in the cities, why the left should spend less time appealing to college students with purple hair and more time on older black women, and how pursing a maximalist agenda can risk losing the bare minimum.

You can view the video of this conversation here.

I talk with Damon Linker of Notes from the Middle Ground.

We talk about the history of conservatism, the role of "liberalism" (in the broad sense) on the right, and whether race as a political dividing line is being eclipsed by education as the new dividing line, and why that might not be entirely a good thing.

Watch the video of our conversation here.

I talk with Addison Del Mastro from The Deleted Scenes.

We talk about the hidden regulations that make our cities and suburbs the way they are, the often distorting effects of central planning applies to land use, the Housing Theory of Everything, and the recent bipartisan awakening on housing issues.

Watch the video of our conversation here.