The Powerline Show [OLD]

Yep, it's happening. I'm getting the band back together, and reviving the Power Line Classic Podcast format, featuring me in conversation with individual guests of note, though from time to time we may get the Power Line Gang itself to appear on some special legacy episodes.  This has been a while in the making, partly by popular demand from listeners who liked our interviews.

Among other things, I want to do a series of episodes between now and July 4, and perhaps after July 4, with some of the authors of the flood of new books appearing right now coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  I've written about a few of these for the New York Post, and will have more installments to come.  

My first guest for the revived show is one of my favorite current historians who appeared once before: David T. Beito, who is emeritus professor of history at the University of Alabama. His latest book, which I mentioned in one of my New York Post features late last year, is FDR: A New Political Life.  This book is a sequel to a previous book that reviewed the massive violations of civil liberties that occurred during the New Deal—transgressions that have been largely airbrushed out of the sympathetic liberal histories of FDR and the New Deal. 

David's new book takes a broader look at the whole FDR story, and concludes with a blunt assessment: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was not a great president nor even a good one. The reasons for making this assessment is long"

Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow and director of of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, joins us today to talk about his timely new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America's Elites. While America's judiciary has moved to the right in recent years along with the revival of constitutional originalism, our law schools, always left of center, have been moving steadily further to left. Shapiro is himself a victim of a campus inquisition at the hands of the Diversity Industrial Complex, but the problems extend far beyond just the DEI morass. 

In addition to reviewing some aspects of his book, we also coax an origin story out of him, as Ilya grew up in the old Soviet Union and in 1980 immigrated with his parents first to Canada, and then ultimately to the United States.

When the history of civil rights in our time is finally written—though no history is ever “finally” written of course—honest writers will mark the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action admissions cases as a key turning point in restoring the principle of equal rights as understood by the founders. 

Further, the better histories will note they key role of one person: Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions that brought the Harvard/UNC cases.

Edward is modest and self-effacing about his role, but it was a long slog to get to the finish line successfully, and there were many disappointments, setbacks, and equivocal rulings along the way in a constitutional story that is nearly 60 years old at this point. In surveying the story arc of Edward’s efforts, I am reminded of Lord Randolph Churchill’s succinct description of Disraeli’s political career in Britain. It was, Lord Randolph said, “Failure, failure, failure, partial success, renewed failure—complete and ultimate triumph.”

Edward would say, and I agree, that the triumph isn’t complete or ultimate yet, but the blow stuck with the ruling in the Harvard/UNC case is proving instrumental in the Trump administration’s current efforts to end the abusive regime of DEI. 

In the conversation that follows I ask Edward how he got committed to this cause in the first place, some interesting inside aspects of the cases, and where we go from here.