The Bob Zadek Show

John McGinnis says 2018 was a bad omen for classical liberalism

I was careful not to be too dour in my “Progress Report for Liberty: 2018,” noting that many subtle victories for liberty were achieved at the state level while the vitriol of national politics raged around us like a storm. Classical liberals should be cheerful about the ongoing reforms to our drug laws, the forward march of technology, and some notably positive developments in the Supreme Court (including the landmark decision of Janus v. AFSCME).

However, I also noted the frightful prospect of a national political scene in which Elizabeth Warren scores points for proposing full-on socialism sneakily disguised as the “Accountable Capitalism Act.” John O. McGinnis, the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law and author of Originalism And The Good Constitution (among other books), has an even more pessimistic take in his recap article, 2018: A Gathering Storm for Classical Liberalism.

He notes, first, the ominous trend toward populism, and the popularity of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who promise to “protect” Americans from the very same forces of competition and free-market dynamism that have built America into the most prosperous nation on earth.

Second, although President Trump has ostensibly done some good for free markets, his persona has contributed to what Gene Healy calls “the Cult of the Presidency,” and placed government right at the center of American social life. Based on these dual forces, McGinnis forecasts a gathering storm, in which aggrandizement of the state acts as the engine for a future collectivist revival.

McGinnis joined me this Sunday to discuss how the President’s recent emergency declaration sets a dangerous precedent for future administrations. Your calls are welcome on the show of ideas, not attitude:

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Marc Joffe says that California’s High Speed Rail is a Cautionary Tale for

the Green New Deal.

2020 election forecasters would do well to look to California as an early indicator of how the Democratic Party might position itself to compete with President Trump’s popular style. As the saying goes, “As California goes, so goes the nation.”

In areas from the environment to immigration, [California has tried its unique left-coast spin on Federalism](https://medium.com/@rzadek/california-discovers-federalism-d299f11d623) — bucking national standards in favor of its own progressive exemptions. Our vehicle emission standards have shaped the national debate, and the ambitious high speed rail bill is emblematic of California’s can-do spirit when it comes to tackling greenhouse gas emissions.

Governor Gavin Newsom says there’s “no way” he’s running for President in 2020—he has a job to do for at least 4 years—but the agenda he laid out in his recent State of the State address reflects the likely priorities of the pool of Democratic contenders. It was boldly progressive, pitting “California Values” against the President’s vision of America. Yet compared to the extremism of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal,” Newsom’s environmental agenda looks conservative.

[Marc Joffe, a senior policy analyst for the Reason Foundation,](https://reason.org/author/marc-joffe/) did the rest of us a favor by tuning in to the Governor’s address last week, and recently [wrote a piece](https://reason.org/commentary/new-governor-scales-back-california-high-speed-rail/) dealing with a surprisingly pragmatic plank of Newsom’s agenda. Whereas former Governor Brown hoped the bullet train from LA to SF would be his legacy and didn’t budge in the face of harsh economic realities, Newsom is confronting the possibility of a lack of funds to complete the project. He used his speech to signal his plans to limit costs by truncating the proposed line south of Bakersfield and west of Merced:

> “Let’s level about high-speed rail. The current project, as planned, would cost too much and, respectfully, take too long.” — Gavin Newsom in his first State of the State address
>

It looks like the classic parable* of the builder who failed to take stock of his inventory before beginning a project, and finds himself short before it’s finished. In this case, California may still be able to cut its losses before incurring the most expensive sections of the rail, although the sunk costs include the construction of the now-overkill “Transbay Terminal” that was supposed to serve as the terminus in San Francisco. Joffe notes that the $2.2 billion station will now amount to little more than an enormous bus stop.

This cautionary tale can come in handy whenever progressives begin lecturing on sustainability. It is even more relevant to the conversation around the Green New Deal, which promises nation-wide high speed rail as a substitute for vehicles and airplanes. **[Marc will join the show’s producer Charlie Deist this Sunday to debunk “AOC’s” daringly bad legislative proposal before it picks up steam in the popular imagination.](http://bobzadek.com/listen-live)**

Moderates in the Democratic Party would be wise to read up on the cold, hard experience of HSR in California, which demonstrates why centrally-planned mega-projects are a bad way to combat greenhouse gas emissions. Marc summarized the main reasons in a recent article:

> In a 2010 UC Berkeley study, Professors Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath estimated that the entire California high-speed rail project would generate 9.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide during construction.
>

> Chester and Horvath estimated that it would take high-speed rail 71 years of operation at medium occupancy to offset its own construction-related greenhouse-gas emissions. Given the project’s delays and carbon reductions being achieved by new technology, like electric vehicles, it is possible that, if built, the rail system will never pay back the carbon investment required to build it.
>

**[Opinion: California overstates bullet train climate benefits***While delays, cost overruns and an adverse state audit have fueled opposition to California's high-speed rail project…*www.eastbaytimes.com](https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion-california-overstates-bullet-train-climate-benefits/)

Such figures raise the specter that a Green New Deal, which invests massively in the present to offset future carbon emissions, will merely accelerate the warming effects of industrial capitalism (if you buy into that premise).

Marc and Charlie explore the “Net Present Value” calculations necessary for a full accounting of costs and benefits of various green technologies.

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Harlow Unger on Dr. Benjamin Rush’s Legacy .

You probably have never heard of Dr. Benjamin Rush — the only medical doctor to sign the Declaration of Independence—and although his star has faded over time, his influence over the better-known founders was second to none.

Today, when Rush’s named is mentioned, it is often in reference to his mistaken belief in the efficacy of bloodletting as a treatment for everything from Yellow Fever to mental illness. Suffering from cramps? Try letting out a few ounces of blood. For persistent headaches, maybe drain a couple of pints. In the most extreme cases, such as the mysterious and deadly virus that devastated many colonial cities in the decades following the American Revolution, Dr. Rush prescribed repeated and prolonged bloodletting of up to 75% of his patients’ blood.

While his treatments of the Yellow Fever epidemic may have failed (and in some cases made his patients worse), Rush also intuited one of the root causes in the damp, filthy streets of the time. He thought the illness resulted from a toxic miasma emanating from the moisture, when in fact it was spread by mosquitos breeding in the stagnant water pools. In any event, his tireless campaigning for improved sanitation and hygiene were a major part of the solution.

Like all of the Founding Fathers, Rush was a product of his time. He studied under the best and brightest, and tended to thousands of sick with his burgeoning knowledge of medicine. It’s easy to focus on his blunders, borne of the universal ignorance of doctors of his time, and look past his many accomplishments. Harlow Unger, the prolific historian who has authored 10 biographies of founding fathers, has released the antidote to this one-sided treatment of a fascinating but little-known figure of American history in his new biography.

Unger records Rush’s close relationships with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, how he healed a divided nation at many critical junctures, and how his pioneering social work laid a foundation for the fulfillment of the Constitution’s promise of equal liberty for all.

Unger thoroughly dispels the notion that history is all dates and names. He casts the story of Rush’s life and times in such vivid detail that the reader feels as if he was amid the horrible outbreak of Yellow Fever, which simultaneously devastated city populations along the Eastern Seaboard yet may have saved the fledgling union from a rebellion brewing in New York at the hands of French envoy to the U.S., Edmund-Charles Genet.

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A poet and former revolutionary demythologizes the Bolivarian Revolution

and breaks down the failure of socialism in Venezuela

Just days ago, the European Union joined the U.S. and dozens of other countries in recognizing Juan Guiadó as the new interim President of Venezuela. While the ousting of Hugo Chavez’s strongman successor Nicolas Maduro is not a done deal, those who follow Venezuelan politics closely predict the imminent demise of the brutal socialist regime. Will this be the tipping point for one of the most repressive governments in the Western hemisphere? We may know soon.

The horrors of life in Venezuela are well-documented, and have been presented on this show in the past by guests like Fergus Hodgson (aka “the Stateless Man”), who shared his first-hand experience of South American dysfunction. This Sunday, we will hear from someone who has been positioned even closer to the center of Venezuelan politics, first as a supporter, then as an arch-critic.

Clifton Ross is a Berkeley-based writer, film journalist and poet who describes his conversion from Bolivarian co-revolutionary to skeptic and eventual enemy of socialism in his memoir, Home from the Dark Side of Utopia. He had been reporting on Latin American revolutionary and social movements since 1982, when he produced the 2016 documentary titled “In the Shadow of the Revolution.”

This project earned him the disdain of his former comrades—including many arm-chair revolutionaries from the U.S., who never witnessed the devastation of the Chavista regime firsthand. For decades, he was a true believer in the Bolivarian project, and at one time was even put up in the Caracas Hilton by the government during the Second World Poetry Festival of Venezuela. Despite completely rejecting socialism now, Ross remains in solidarity with many of the social movements that have taken root in opposition to Chavez/Maduro.

The latest opposition coalition includes elements from center-right to left. Guiadó, the rightly elected president of the National Assembly (akin to America’s Congress) has gained support of the international community by leading the charge to restore fair elections, representative democracy, and all of the civic institutions that make dictators shudder. Unlike in the past, when such regime change was spearheaded by U.S. intelligence agencies, this time it seems like a natural result of Maduro’s unpopularity combined with the incompetence of his patrons in the military, state-owned industry, and media. (Contrary to what you may have heard, the opposition is succeeding in spite of not because ofsupport from President Trump’s support.)

A Conversion of Sorts
Ross’s views shifted most dramatically in 2013, after seeing how enforcing socialism in Venezuela required the use of totalitarian tactics. In a recent interview, he was quoted saying:

“I no longer think socialism has anything of value to offer the world, even if I think it was a useful movement in the twentieth century to raise important issues of solidarity, social justice, class conflict and so on. But the very fact that it required a totalitarian state to destroy a market economy and centralize all power so as to guarantee the establishment and continuation of its utopian project entailed the elimination of real solidarity and real social justice. How can you have solidarity when you’re afraid the worker standing next to you might be undercover police who could arrest you for saying the wrong thing?”

His memoir makes the same point, nothing that all political ideologies are rooted in a mythological idea of the Revolution (capital R) along with some messianic ideal of perfection. In socialism this is embodied by the Workers. In the neoliberal ideology it is the Self-Regulating Market. True revolutions, he says, are a restoration or conservation of original principles—not the creation of Utopia. Many of Ross’s ideas will be familiar to classical liberals, but he also embraces less talked about “first principles,” such as those promoted by the indigenous social movements of South America. Native peoples are especially concerned with the extractive practices of Venezuela’s oil industry, which could end up endangering the planet in the name of loftier ideals of “progress” and “the people.” Filling the void left by the old Leninist vanguard in Venezuela will require a democratic patchwork of smaller social movements. These can only be sustained, Ross argues, by liberal democracy with checks and balances on power.

Clif joined Bob for the full hour to explain how he came to see the truth about himself and the “Revolution,” in all its complex shades of light. They dissect Clif’s journey from his conservative Christian upbringing on Air Force Bases, through liberation theology in Berkeley and the Zapatistas in Mexico, to his career as a skeptical independent writer/filmmaker. Lastly, they discuss what fundamentalist religions share in common with radical socialism, and how in the long run left-wing and right authoritarianism converge on a vision of Apocalyptic Utopian Messianic Millenarianism (AUMM).

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Social Media Can’t Handle Nuance. Can the Republic Survive Social Media?

“The crowd is untruth.” — Søren Kierkegaard

Libertarians are and ought to be naturally skeptical of crowds. Passionate groups may be necessary for some kinds of progress, but it is a recipe for trouble whenever one faction holds too much power.

The brouhaha around the Covington Catholic kids seems to stem from the crowd dynamics and powerful visuals displayed at the Lincoln Memorial last weekend. On one side was a group of rowdy prep school boys—some wearing MAGA hats—fired up by professional antagonists on the other. It’s really no wonder many recoiled at the image of a lone native American elder surrounded by jeering faces of “white privilege,” even though later video revealed a much more nuanced picture.

Soon the response to the incident turned into a mob of its own and one individual from the crowd of rambunctious boys became the target of an unprecedented drive-by media shooting. This was a separate event from the boys’ tribalistic display, which itself was an off-shoot of another group’s aggressive tribalism (a group known as the Black Hebrew Israelites hurled vile insults for nearly an hour before the boys began their school chants). But by the time the full video footage came to light, vindicating the boys and implicating those who rushed to judgment, the damage to the Republic had already been done.

A Twitter mob descended on the boys. Threats poured into their Kentucky high school and false accusations were directed at innocent bystanders. Confirmation bias and selection of preferred facts was the genre du jour on social media, and rumors and innuendo ruled the day. It was a textbook case of the “Truth Decay” I recently explored with RAND corporation’s Jennifer Kavanagh.

Eventually, Robby Soave (an editor of Reason Magazine) decided to actually watch the footage in its entirety to see what really happened. Soave has a keen eye for media hoaxes on politically charged issues—he was one of the first to express skepticism when Rolling Stone released the now-debunked UVA rape story. However, his critical eye toward sloppy journalism does not make him a knee-jerk contrarian. He has also pointed out that while we should not automatically believe everyone who claims victimhood, neither should we dismiss such claims lightly.

Soave’s careful article was widely read and provoked apologies from many on the left and the right. Calmer heads may not have prevailed, but the article slowed down the spiral of madness.

The point of this is emphatically not to take sides with one tribe or another, nor is it to neglect to assign guilt to those who acted foolishly or perpetuated false narratives, but simply to recognize that our politics have devolved into an ugly form tribal warfare. In rushing to find, tar, and feather the ideal political scapegoat, every tribe in the culture war ends up obscuring the real victims and creating new ones in the process.

I have pointed out that this is inevitable when so much power is vested in the Federal Government. “We the People” feel powerless, and so we lash out in fear and anger.

There are two remedies as I see it:
1) Fact-based journalism — we need to value media that takes time to digest the facts before reaching a conclusion. Soave has done an exemplary job on this front, and I look forward to hosting him on my show to discuss the topic with the care that it deserves.

2) Decentralization of power — Whether or not people realize it, much of the rancor and polarization of our politics stems from its increasing centralization. When power solidifies in Washington D.C., there is a demonstrative erosion of freedom. When people feel freedom disappearing, they feel powerless. This brings out the worst in them.

One more thing we can do to combat the dangers of rapid-response social media is foster in-depth conversations where the truth can be analyzed from all angles. Tune in to the show this Sunday(8–9am Pacific Time) to my conversation with Robby about what happened, and what it means for our democracy.

I encourage you to listen. Maybe we can all give Twitter a break.

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