Speaker 1 00:00:06 Everyone welcome to identity crisis. The show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute in partnership with the Jewish telegraphic agency, I mean, you could occur to their president of Shalom Hartman Institute, North America. We're recording on January 7th, 2021, my birthday, happy birthday to me. And the day after quite a bit of drama taking place here in America, here in Washington, around to what should have been a pro forma process of the confirmation of the electoral college vote in Congress. Uh, something of an inept coup attempt in Washington. And, uh, I'm thrilled to be in conversation today with a friend and colleague Yoni Applebaum, the ideas editor at the Atlantic Yoni. Thanks for joining me today on this momentous moment, we knew something was going to be going on in Washington, uh, and in America around the time of the kind of pre inauguration, I don't think we quite anticipated how dramatic and timely this conversation would be. So first thanks for being here. And how are you? How's your family. I know you live in Washington. How's the mood around you?
Speaker 2 00:01:07 Well, thanks for having me on and, and happy birthday. It's, it's nice to have something to be cheerful about this morning. I would describe the mood in Washington as tense and watchful. I, uh, thankfully live distantly enough from Capitol Hill that I was not directly exposed to the events yesterday. Although I have many colleagues who were there in person, I think that this is a city that is on edge that did not expect perhaps should have expected, but did not expect what unfolded yesterday and, and is a little uncertain about what will enfold today, but the streets are relatively calm and some degree of waters being restored.
Speaker 1 00:01:42 So I reached out to you last night. You don't need to just check whether you'd still be able to be on this podcast today, knowing that a major piece of your work is commissioning and writing responses. I think there were already like 11 on the Atlantic website this morning responses to yesterday, including I think you wrote something that said impeach Trump again. Then you responded to me saying, yes, I could do this podcast. I think you responded around 1:00 AM. So tell me a little bit about just what the last 24 hours have looked like and felt like for you in your work around media and interpretation right now, what the climate has felt like for you, the sense of urgency, just help our listeners understand a little bit what it looks like to be on the kind of political interpretation side of the business right now.
Speaker 2 00:02:26 Yeah, I think we should all step back for a second and remember that this is supposed to be a very boring period in American politics. We elected a new president back into November that became clear within about a week of the election. We've gone through an extended period of the loser being unwilling to accept his locks, mounting a series of sort of fantastical legal challenges that have been laughed out of court, including by many judges whom he appointed. And we arrived now at one of the sort of screens and oddly rituals
Speaker 3 00:03:00 Of our democracy, which is that on January 6th, these ballots that have been cast by electors and various state capitals arrived at the United States Capitol are sent on by the national archives, which receives them. And they are counted the purpose of this ritual. And it's the ritual scheme in a couple of hundred years of history is that you want it to be sure that that the ones who are arriving at the Capitol were in fact the right ones, because you want it to be sure that hadn't been swapped in the mail. So to speak that whatever certificate was there was signed by the people who were supposed to sign it had the correct numbers on it. So it's a verification procedure. It was intended to ensure that we are counting the right electoral votes. It is a formality, it is a ritual. It is not a point of debate or contestation.
Speaker 3 00:03:42 It's not a moment to decide whether or not the States had counted their ballots correctly. You can be a moment if there are multiple contested slates of electrodes coming from a single state to decide which one to honor, but, but that's not the case this year. And so this ought to have been an extraordinarily boring day in the nation's Capitol. Instead, I woke up and first watched the president of the United States, having some in tens of thousands of supporters from across the country, by lying to them about what was taking place and what had taken place, whereas their passions and their furious deliberately in insight, a crowd of people who were already on edge, who already had been lied to by the president and told that evil forces were subverting democracy, stealing a victory from out of his grasp. And then he turned in and retreated to the white house after having encouraged that mob to go pressure Congress and the mob went in and pressured Congress exactly as he had asked them to do and burst through the lines of Elise, who clearly were not expecting them to do this, who are prepared for a handful of agitators, but not a vast crowd.
Speaker 3 00:04:48 Bent on violence, came into the halls of the Capitol building, which is a somewhat labyrinthine. There are a wide variety of entrances to that complex. It is difficult to secure the people. And I think I really want to emphasize this ordinary working people, staff, the United States Capitol, they are friendly. They are polite. Uh, as I walk in and out of that building, you get to know some of them, but they're not privileged to leads. They're ordinary workers who mopped the floors and secure the doors that's whose lives were, were most at risk yesterday, uh, in the violence. And they had no reason to have feared it. And that was w we were left scrambling to unpack how we had come to this, the nation that likes to brag. It is one of the world's oldest democracies watching as a violent mob, attacked the seat of government in order to disrupt the orderly transition of power. It's something that we have rarely seen before I live on, on a battlefield, 150 years ago, there was a battle in my neighborhood. I say, Confederate army came as close as any Confederates came during the civil war before being turned away. Uh, Abraham Lincoln came up here and watch that battle. It was a near one thing, but, but
Speaker 2 00:05:58 In fact, the Confederates were turned away from the Capitol. Uh, yesterday they were not, there were Confederate battle flags flapping over the shoulders of some of these riders as they walked through the Capitol. Uh, that was not a sign I, I thought I would ever see.
Speaker 1 00:06:12 Yeah, the symbolism, not just the Confederate flag in the Capitol. And my understanding is they never, never reached the Capitol, the Confederate flag until yesterday, but also simultaneously to see a Confederate flag and American flag and a Nazi flag. It's actually, so anarchic has to be confusing. There's no consistent message of the American idea that's actually located there. It actually feels deeply in archaic. I want to talk about an essay that you wrote about a year ago and a focus on that because the essay that you wrote a year ago actually read kind of like prophecy as I was reading it again yesterday in preparation for today, it's, it's an essay that has had, um, great currency in our Institute. We've talked about it quite a bit, but before I get to that one question, just kind of looking forward for so much over the last few months, there's been a kind of, I don't know, scoffing at well, there's the sillies lawsuits.
Speaker 1 00:07:01 There's the four seasons landscaping company. This isn't really serious. And of course yesterday demonstrates that it is far more serious as a threat to American democracy than the skeptics claimed. This has kind of been part of the Trump presidency all along. The kind of, we take him literally, but not seriously or seriously, but not literally, depending on who you are, I've sensed politically a kind of let's hold our breath, get to January 20th. And of course, he's going to leave quietly. I don't know what to think now, whether that's actually going to happen. Do you think that this marks a turning point about how serious and vigilant we have to be for the next two weeks? Or do you think this marks the kind of final release of that frustration? And now we can kind of quietly wait the next couple of weeks out.
Speaker 2 00:07:46 So one of the crimes, which I will one day have to adjourn is having written the headline taking Trump seriously, not literally. I am guilty here. And, and there's two halves to the formulation. The point of the article written by a journalist named Linda Zito was that Trump supporters don't take them. Literally. They don't always assume that he literally means what he says, but they take them extremely seriously. And I think that second half of it sometimes falls out of the conversation. Trump is remarkably directed to battles intentions, although he is remarkably plastic about his meetings, he has said from the beginning that he intends to win the election by any means necessary, uh, that, that he does not regard his, his loss as legitimate would not regard any losses, legitimate. Uh, and we all ought to have been taking him extremely seriously about that, even though when he says legislatures will throw out these votes, um, perhaps that is not literally the mechanism that people use.
Speaker 2 00:08:38 And so I think that we remain in a extremely dangerous period these next couple of weeks, because Donald Trump does not wish to acknowledge that he lost the election. To the extent that there is anyone in his orbit who is willing to tell him that there is a means for him not to have lost. He embraces them no, the warnings of his staff, no matter how many time loyal retainers tell him that, that these people are delusional, he's done that repeatedly and embraced crackpot theories. And I imagine he will, again, in the next couple of weeks, if somebody comes up with a new one, but the real thread, and this is where I can't claim a gift of clairvoyance or prophecy, I am by training a historian. And when I wrote that article, um, I was looking back not forward. And I look back to the American past because I think it helps us understand where we are in the present.
Speaker 2 00:09:23 It helps us see that the things that are happening are not unprecedented are not a sudden rupture with the American experience, but rather they are the flowering of seeds that have been out there. And some of those seeds have not been watered in a long time, but, but they were always there. And so what I really worry about is, is frankly, 2024 is 2028. It is the fact that more than a hundred Republican members of Congress last night voted to reject the electoral votes of States that supported a man. They did not wish to be president really for no greater reason than they disliked the outcome. They substituted their judgment for that of the voters. There was no consistent logic applied. They did not contest votes in States that had exhibited the same purported flaws in their process, but voted for Trump. They limited their scrutiny to those States that had supported, uh, his democratic rival.
Speaker 2 00:10:17 And, um, they threw out the boats or they tried enough. Republicans broke inside with Democrats to stop that in the Senate. Um, and that's the other lesson I would take from this. And, and I think that it's a really important one to focus on this morning is that the threats are very large in 2024 and 2028. There could be another effort to do this. There will always be a pretext for doing this. And what we saw was that our institutions are very fragile, but the flip side of that is that our institutions are for the moment holding. They will hold as long as we recognize their fragility, they will hold. As long as Americans understand that all that sustains them is their active participation, their insistence on adherence to norms and rules, their respect for process, they will shatter, uh, to the extent that more and more Americans lose faith in neutral processes and no longer invest those institutions with their power.
Speaker 1 00:11:09 The article in question is called how America ends it's from the Atlantic in December of 2019. And part of the reason it feels prophetic is your opening sentences. Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. And yeah, it could news bad news that has not played out. I want to start at the end of the article, which is really your punchline, your conclusion, and then we'll work back through some of your assumptions. And I'll try to figure out whether we can tie this in some way to the Jewish community, your broad conclusion, which felt very smart to me. And also a little bit uncomfortable was the way in which America is going to get out of. This is through a principled conservatism. Uh, liberals have been arguing essentially since the Trump election about the basically decrepitude of the Republican party, the capitulation Trumpism, and you do a deep analysis of where Trumpism comes from, why it is so popular and why it constitutes a real risk.
Speaker 1 00:12:00 So the Republican party is the planting of a certain set of values and ideas for a kind of ethnic preference or ethnic particularity ethnic anxiety. Your argument near the end is, um, the need for a certain type of conservatism. Your key sentence here is the United States possesses a strong radical tradition, but its most successful social movements have generally adopted the language of conservatism, framing their calls for change as an expression of America's founding ideals rather than as a rejection to them. Let me ask two questions about this thesis. One is from a liberal perspective, the problem with American liberalism might be the same, which is the growing unpopularity of the American idea. So at the same time that you want to see conservatives, re-embrace the American idea. And to use that as the anchor to move away from a politics of rage and more to a politics of identifying with America's founding ideals, the bad news is that the left side of the aisle is also uncomfortable with that.
Speaker 1 00:12:59 So I'd love to get some analysis of what's going on, on both the left and the right, the demise of this American idea. And the second question I have is how strange it is right now, post abide in election when there are still senators in Congress who are voting against the certification of the election, how strange it is to kind of put your hopes in conservatives to take their party back as opposed to a kind of burn it all down type of politics. So, so let's start with the first, the question of, is it realistic to see a kind of reclaiming of this American idea when it's obviously not just unpopular among conservatives right now, but it's also increasingly unpopular among liberals.
Speaker 3 00:13:43 How many hours do we have UTA? I mean, let me try to do this standing on one leg as it were. The reason that I focus so much on the importance of a moderate center, right, is, is precisely what we've seen. Uh, the last few months, one way to think about most right-wing movements, uh, is that they are movements that tend to be dominated by those who traditionally enjoyed power and privilege within a society. And even as they start to lose that politically, even if sort of governing majority, culturally ascendent majority, um, slips a little bit, they have a tremendous amount of power and its disruptive power. And to the extent that it is pushed in a reactionary direction and a revanchist direction, it poses tremendous danger, uh, it poses danger of violence. It poses danger of obstruction and repression. And that is one direction which political rights can, can go.
Speaker 3 00:14:38 The healthiest societies in the West over the last couple of hundred years have been those societies in which right wing political leaders are engaged in brokering, some sort of a compromise. They recognize that society needs to change and they help the society move in that direction even as they tap the brakes on the pace of that change. And I don't want to endorse the tapping of the brakes. There's a lot of changes that center, right? Parties have retarded, uh, there's a tremendous amount of injustice that they have endorsed. It's not that this is in some sense, a morally defensible position, but just as you look at which democracies have tended to endure and which ones have shattered the ones in which there is the center, right, which is accommodating their followers to some degree of change power, whether the opposition party fair much better than those in which that right viewers off to the hard, right, and tries to draw a line in the sand and prevent any change.
Speaker 3 00:15:36 And so that really was what I was identifying that that America is presently undergoing a transition that perhaps no healthy stable democracy has ever undergone in which it's culturally ascendent majority, a white Christian majority is becoming a minority. That's a remarkable process. Um, America's experiment and multiracial democracy is not, uh, nearly 250 years old. It's half a century old it's really fragile. We've tried to, to broadly enfranchise our population and have a multiracial democracy during the brief sunrise of, of reconstruction. It lasted for a decade before giving way to redemption in Jim Crow. Um, lots of other injustices followed the Chinese exclusion act. We turned hard away from multiracial democracy. We, we gave it another shot in the 1960s. It was not something Evolent concession. It was a hard fought victory, uh, by the crusaders for justice. But they couched that crusade in the main, as an insistence that America live up to its values.
Speaker 3 00:16:34 We're only half a century into that experiment. One of my colleagues that I'm so are noted to me this morning that almost every member of the United States Senate is younger than our experimental multiracial democracy. Almost every Congressman who voted to support Donald Trump yesterday, uh, was born into a world that was not a multiracial democracy in which most black people did not have the right to vote. And one way to read the events of the last couple of months, it is as an angry opposition to that change. Um, a backlash kicked off by the election of our first black president, um, double down by the nomination of a woman to take power D these are, uh, inversions of the traditional hierarchies of American society. And they are tremendously destabilizing even as, as they can be tremendously exciting. But you know that this does not just move in one direction.
Speaker 3 00:17:21 Also yesterday we had confirmation that in Georgia, 105 years after a Jewish man named Leo, Frank was lynched. And that was an event that helped give birth to the Anti-Defamation league. And also to the rise of the second KU Klux Klan, just 50, some odd years after the main synagogue in Atlanta was, was bombed blown apart for its it's supportive of the civil rights movement. The voters in Georgia went to the polls and elected a black pastor and a Jew. That was a remarkable thing. And it suggests that part of the reason we are seeing such a backlash against the inversion of these hierarchies is that there is in fact, an American majority, which supports a more equitable democracy, but we're in a very precarious moment. And I think that we all have to be aware of that precarity. And it's why I think it is so important to look at the Mitt Romney's of the world, traditional conservatives, who are committed to the project of American democracy and to carrying out the experiment and ensuring it does not fail as the most crucial actors at this moment. Not because I agree with them on everything I disagree with, with Romney's of the world on a tremendous number of things, but because I see them as sort of the gyroscope of democracy, the stabilizing force in a period of chaotic change,
Speaker 1 00:18:38 But your argument goes further than that, which is, it's not just a matter of the search for moderate Republicans to take back the Republican party. It's also a call on Republicans to shift away a narrative of tear it all down towards a narrative of kind of rebuilding America or recommitting to the foundations that are American. I guess, part of what you're hoping for, if I can read into this is it shouldn't be that the only times that a state elects an African-American pastor and a Jew is through the democratic party, right? If that's who America is, that's actually should be represented in both of them are cratic party and the Republican party, but I, where I'm pushing a little bit harder is it feels not coincidental to me that in the past, in the 40 years of the Trump era, it's not that you see the entirety of the democratic party being passionately committed to America's history and American values.
Speaker 1 00:19:31 And then being able to say to the Republican party, look, your kind of ethnic rage is anti-American, you're seeing on the left side of the democratic party, the same type of, I don't want to say it's the same exact type of ethnic rage against the American idea, but it's the multi-ethnic multi-racial version of rage against the American idea. And that's why it feels as though those of us who are either moderate Democrats or moderate Republicans who are interested in some notion of, as you say, the conservative strands of America's political heritage, a bias in favor of continuity, a love for tradition and institutions that is a diminishing minority, both of the Republican party, but also the democratic party. And so I want you to unpack that a little bit because it doesn't seem likely to me that you're going to see a rise of a moderate conservatism. If there isn't a moderate liberalism on the other side, to be able to actually build some sort of moderate center, right?
Speaker 3 00:20:27 Yeah. It's, it's such an important point. And I think you've got it exactly right. There is a way in which this is a reinforcing downward spiral. That to the extent that the political rights you, the political left is as increasingly radical, it feels more embattled and more inclined to indulge its worst impulses and vice versa. You can easily see us society, spiral
Speaker 2 00:20:48 Downwards, both sides, believing that they are reacting rationally to the radicalization of their political opponents. And we risk back on of spiral at this moment. You know, I lie to you a little bit before when I said that that no democracy has ever gone through a transition like this one, America has gone through this particular transition repeatedly. And this is one place where this American story also becomes a Jewish story. I was born in a state where at its initial settlement, the only people who were enfranchised, uh, were members in good standing, uh, the particular church
Speaker 3 00:21:21 Members in, in the sense that they had been recipients of God's grace. Right? So, so even people who regularly attended the church were not necessarily able to vote in Massachusetts back then and gradually over the next couple hundred years, the circles of, of that sort of ruling majority have, have continually been enlarged. Right? So, so first it was okay, we'll let in anyone who is attending the chart and then it was, um, okay, we'll have to go to this particular church. We'll let them, Mr. Balian's vet to. And then the franchise was extended to two white men, that there were property requirements and that were in property requirements. Eventually that this country gets around to enfranchising people who are not white, uh, enfranchise women, Jews arrived in this country, um, before the revolution, but they are, they are a problematic class. You can point to, to Washington's Newport letter and to other expressions of the ideal that, that you should be fulling co-equal citizens in lived reality.
Speaker 3 00:22:19 They were often, uh, indulged, uh, at the sufferings of, of the white Christian majority and treated as co-equal citizens, to the extent that they essentially adopted the cultural and political, and even in some sense, religious framework of that majority. And yet over time that majority adapted each time it was challenged, right? If, if initially the majority of Massachusetts was white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from East Anglia, who were members in good standing of, of what became the congregational church. By the time I was born, uh, anyone born in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts could vote and that majority had continually, uh, extended itself rather than seeing itself be eclipsed. It just redefined what membership in that majority meant, right? So this is the choice that, um, a nation like ours continually faces. Do you enlarged boundaries of citizenship? Do you see it as possible to fold in new groups?
Speaker 3 00:23:11 And there's a Ray of hope here in 2020, Donald Trump actually did quite well among many members of America's working class, particularly he excelled among Hispanic voters. And to some extent, even among black voters, much more than he had in 2016, he did much better with a variety of, of minority groups by having articulated as part of his political message, a message that spoke to them and their concerns. It is possible to build a conservatism that does that. It is possible to have a conservatism that again, speaks for an American majority, but only if political conservatives see that as a possibility, if they define themselves in their identity too narrowly. And I would point to people like Senator Josh Hawley as having done this, they're pretty much screwed because that might already is shrinking. And, uh, it is going to be subsumed and you find them turning toward counter majority Marion means to retain power.
Speaker 3 00:24:03 Some of those are our legal unconstitutional gerrymandering that the power of the Senate, the filibuster stuffing, the courts with sympathetic judges and justices, uh, some of them are, are not constitutional trying to throw out votes from States that have voted in a way you do not like, but that is the direction that you go. Once you stop trying to enlarge the majority, once you hardened in your political identity, identify your political party with a particular ethnic religious, cultural heritage, and no longer see it as capacious enough to expand and adapt over time. That's where I see the risk of the American idea is that the political right moves in this direction defines itself in some sense, as an embattled white Christian majority. And you can look at polls. If you poll white Christians, they overwhelmingly will tell you that they are the most persecuted group in America.
Speaker 3 00:24:49 They will rank themselves ahead of a for example, African-Americans in that respect. Um, if that's what they believe, if they see themselves as an embattled group that is having their country taken away from them. And in, in 2016, you could pose that question to voters in the Republican primary. And it was a much better indicator than any other question we pose to them, whether or not they would support Donald Trump. Do you use to yourself as a stranger in your own country? If they said, yes, they were a Trump voter. They said, no, they were a cruise wetter or some other kinds of butter. And so if they see themselves as an embattled minority, they will fight in that fight that will further radicalize the American left. And then they will see in the radicalization of the left and the identitarian left a validation of their own fear and fight harder. But if they can see their way back to the place that conservatives have traditionally managed to save themselves, if they can see their way back toward expanding their definition of what it is to be American, then they don't need to lose. And if they don't need to fear losing, then they don't have to fight this hard and they don't have to junk our institutions on the way.
Speaker 1 00:25:46 Yeah. The trap, however, is that it's so easy to simply classify the left as identitarian, whether or not it actually sees itself that way. And once you've made that move, once you've convinced enough people that that's what's going on, you don't feel implicated by needing to come up with an alternative. And what it does then in terms of the left is that it incentivize the left to say, screw it. Why am I trying to appeal to some moderate sensor? If this is the way I'm going to be painted. Anyway, I think the Warnick story is kind of a good example to that effect when it comes out of as much of a waltz area and political tradition of the slow Marshall of the wilderness, as much as anyone else, that's his religious, ethnic, political heritage as the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church. But if it could be painted as a radical socialist at a certain point, you know, at a certain point, you see the left basically saying, okay, if either way, I'm going to be a radical socialist, all right, then defund the police.
Speaker 1 00:26:38 Fine. I'll actually embrace that terminology because that at least it will signal to those who the identitarian politics that that's actually the right kind of politics that we should be pursuing. And let me push one, one other thing you can see, you alluded to your colleague, Adam, sir, where an Adam had written a piece about the false premise of civility and where he talks about the certain type of capitulation that civility civility brings with it. When in the Trump era civility to the Trump administration is basically, as he says, I let you do what you want and I don't object. So that seems to be the cyclical force that we're in politically is the hope for a moderate turn among conservatives generates a kind of instinct to civility on the political left, as opposed to how do I fight back in the most full-throated way to reclaim the democracy that
Speaker 2 00:27:25 You know, I, I belong to, to, uh, shool a synagogue in Washington, DC, you know, like other synagogues that's lay led. And the current president was a clerk for Antonin Scalia before him, the president of the synagogue was a senior house, democratic leadership ed. Mike can go further back. One of them was married to a Trump appointee. I have this unusual American experience for 2020, uh, being embedded in a community of people who deeply disagree with each other about some very basic political issues. My kids have gone to school with the president's grandkids for much of the last four years. This is unusual in America. For the most part, Americans live in separate silos. They increasingly have sorted themselves geographically, and we have good research that suggests it's not so much even that they're seeking each other out it's that this, this snowballs that if you move into a neighborhood that's mostly democratic, your views will, will shift the left as a consequence of being immersed in that social situation.
Speaker 2 00:28:25 So it's not just that we're sending by sorting ourselves geographically. We are sufficiently sorted geographically already that these kinds of communities push our views one way or the other. We know that fewer and fewer Americans mixed with each other are bounded within any kind of community in which they're stuck with each other. Right. I don't mean to paint myself as virtuous. I belong to the local show. Of course I do. Where else am I going to go on a Chabad is the one in which I can walk, but for now, it's what I've got. Right? And I have to find a way to live with the people there. Even if I profoundly disagree with them, they're members of my community. They have to another level on which we connect and we're stuck with each other. Most Americans no longer have the experience of being stuck with people, with whom they disagree.
Speaker 2 00:29:02 Politically. They no longer belong to clubs and organizations as they did 50 years ago, they no longer live in places where there are people who live on their block and have different political views or send their kids to the same elementary school and have different political views. These are now unusual American experiences. We know that 50 years ago, most Americans were horrified by the idea of interracial marriage, of, of their own child, marrying somebody of a different racial ethnic group. Although perfectly fine with inter partisan marriage. Those numbers have flipped overwhelmingly Americans. Now tell pollsters that they have no problem with interracial marriage, but would be horrified if their child married somebody of the opposite political. And the reason I mentioned all of this is that when we're thinking about how to deescalate the kind of partisan vilification and mutual incomprehensibility that you pointed you to, I think it's not merely a matter of rhetoric and it's not merely a matter of Goodwill.
Speaker 2 00:29:57 Part of this is a crumbling and collapse of communities to the extent that there is a Jewish idea embedded in the American polity. It is the idea of the Hebraic Republic, which was enormously influential to the political thinkers around the time of, of the founding, to the Protestants who arrived modern representative democracy. They were thinking of a polity as constituted of a community, a covenantal community where people committed to each other to sustain that polity and where power fluid from the consent of the governed. They didn't just do that in their government. They did that in many, many lived respects of their daily lives. It was how they chose to set up their businesses, right? So we got the corporation with the board and the shareholders who can vote. It's how they set up their institutions rather than budgetary control or something like that. Most of these institutions elected their officers out of their memberships, how they set up their religious communities.
Speaker 2 00:30:52 This was weird. I mean, you can think about when New York attempts to appoint a chief rabbi, it invites a very respected rabbi to come to America. And around 1900, you arrives here and is stunned to discover that nobody really wants to pay his salary because it's a voluntary subscription of all the synagogues. And nobody really wants to follow his electric rulings because why should that they have their own rabbi. Eventually he starts like certifying kosher meat because he needs to find some sort of income, but it doesn't work very well. And that experiment is repeated in a number of American cities, but it's not just Jews. There's this remarkable correspondence that once came across between the bishops in Chicago and Nevada, where the Pope tells them that everybody has to attend their parish church and they write back and explain that the poles want to go to the church with the Polish priests and the Slovaks want to go with a Slovak priest.
Speaker 2 00:31:37 And the Pope says, but they're Catholics. You tell them what to do, and they do it. And the bishops are left to sort of try to explain gently to the Vatican that they're Catholics, but they're also American and they're not, they don't listen anymore. Um, and, and that is, I mean, that's a very American story of communities controlling their own institutions and believing that they ought to be embedded in these institutions. And to the extent that that decays we're in a lot of trouble, because we lived these principles through all aspects of our life. And as they've disappeared from other aspects of our lives, they become harder to sustain in a political way.
Speaker 1 00:32:10 This is one of the gifts and flaws of the American idea and of the American experience for Jews as for other Americans, is that Jewishness in America is a voluntary association. And Americanness is effectively a voluntary association. It's such a big, it's such a heavily baked in piece of our story is this story of autonomy. And, and even in your example of your shool, the key piece that you said was that it has to be a show that you walk to. And once Jews like other Americans can opt into whatever version of an association they want to participate in, it eliminates all of the incentive of thinking about the collective in the ways that it's painful.
Speaker 4 00:32:45 Hello, my name is Alisha, and I want to invite you to join me on an exciting intellectual journey together with faculty from the shadow Institute. You know, your Hebrew language is escaped in our first season. We're focusing on the long history of cultural clashes between Judaism and its surroundings from the Bible and today looking at how it's interacted with everyone from canal Knights, to Christianity and Islam, discussing thinkers, like my monitor theater hotel, and the harder you can find the show on Spotify and other podcast platforms by searching for escape, which might be group, or by going to our website.
Speaker 1 00:33:27 So let me ask you on this. I gave a talk in Washington a couple of years ago about the distinction that we should be preserving between the moral, the political and the partisan. These are all obviously related to each other, but our moral differences with one another should be far more transcendent. In other words, the things we hold in common should be bigger and it should get narrower. As we move down the political and partisan line, as you move from big ideas to strategies, and you make reference to this in your article as well. When you talk about you quote a researcher saying the dehumanization may loosen the moral restraints that would normally prevent us from harming another human being. So at Hartman, we tried to take on this idea and asked, what are the shared moral or religious convictions that if you found like right-wing Jews and left-wing Jews, what would be a commitment that they would share in common?
Speaker 1 00:34:17 Whereas the center of the Venn diagram of a moral commitment that they would hold in common. And the only one we could kind of come up with was disability inclusion, which is like a big thing in many sectors of the Orthodox community has been leading on this for, for decades. And of course is a progressive value, but on almost every other issue, you start to see them pull apart. So I'd love to briefly take that exercise for the American people. What's the American people's version of what could sit at the Venn diagram of a larger set of American slash moral considerations that we consider essential to the American project that we then can separate between our partisan disagreement and our moral agreement.
Speaker 3 00:35:01 The Atlantic was founded as the magazine of the American idea, and one of our founders Emerson once wrote an essay in which he tried to sort of like pin that down. And he said that he'd never managed to put it better than Nora Mark. You overheard passing a school yard where one kid said to the other I'm as good as you be as, as sort of a distillation of the American project, the radical notion that I'm as good as you are. That you're as good as I am, that we are all people of equal worth that remains the most disruptive idea that America has ever launched into the world. And I think that you can still see that across the partisan divide, that at our best Americans are committed to recognizing the humanity of every individual American at our worst, we have denied it, right?
Speaker 3 00:35:47 We've burned the nation that, that grew wealthy off of human chattel, slavery. Um, but that denied that, that inherent spark of God in each man. And yet that idea was the thing that ultimately Feld chattel slavery, uh, because people like Emerson insistent upon it. If you want to find a central to the American consensus, an imperfect center, one, one, which is often a hundred from the breach, I think that's where it is the notion that we're not a country of hereditary aristocracy or cast. I'm not saying we always live up to it, but I think that that is a basis for consensus. And, and frankly, it's, it's maybe also when you pointed disability inclusion, which was such a marvelous example that gives us sort of a practical illustration of this because it's expressed in different terms, right? If, if you asked a religious conservative about disability inclusion, they would partially, it's driven by being part of a bounded community, uh, in which people with disabilities exist, they are inherently members of your community.
Speaker 3 00:36:43 You would have to actively exclude them. And so people with inbounded communities are often more inclusive in one way or another, but they might express it in terms of, of the spark of God, right? They might've expressed it in, in that kind of moral and religious language, focusing on the worth of an individual. If you ask somebody on the political left in contemporary America, they are more likely to articulate the same set of conclusions and language of rights in a language of justice. So we can get to the same point framed from different perspectives, but you find that overlap in the Venn diagram on those points where Americans, whether they're approaching it through the frame of rights or are approaching it through a moral or religious framework and up at that same, at that same spot. And then we can build from there, because if we recognize that we are all equal, if we recognize the inherent humanity of every American, um, there's a lot that you can build on that foundation.
Speaker 3 00:37:37 The scariest people I've talked to over the last four years are people who have lost sight of this principle who have ceased to see their political opponents as human as lives, worth respecting who can see life as worth sacrificing, particularly if it's somebody else's life. And particularly if it is obstructing their way in a political cause those are very frightening conversations. A number of my colleagues were important from the mall and the conversations that they brought back the most under me were the ones that seem to untethered from reality almost as if some people who were there were lost in a role-playing. And in which the other characters were sort of NPCs in the language of video games. Non-player characters, the little figures that move around on your screen, motivated by artificial intelligence, who can be slaughtered with impunity because they'll spawn a new and who, who were there mostly to be regarded for their utility. And maybe you can trade with them, or maybe they'll help you on your request. Once you've divorced yourself from reality, to the extent that you no longer see the human spark and the people that you're talking to. That's a dangerous flux.
Speaker 1 00:38:36 Yeah. Last question on that, let you go back to this. You have really important work that you're doing on behalf of all of us. And I see it. I see echoes of that kind of work that we tried to do at the Tom Hartman Institute, a kind of passionate commitment to pluralism, to peoplehood for the Jewish people, in spite of the fact of all of these divisions and the ways that we're pulling apart. I guess I just have to ask you, and maybe this is just because I need my own inspiration. Do you sometimes feel like we're bringing knives to a gunfight? Sure. Yeah. And tell us like, and why is that still worth doing
Speaker 3 00:39:07 I'm in one of the most precarious occupational roles in America, which is opinion editor from mainstream publication, that the half-life of people in this job is not long. I tend to think of what I'm trying to do and maybe a slightly different frame than pluralism. Think of it as having a deep and unshakeable commitment to a particular set of ends. We want America to be a freer and more just society. We'd like to fight against racism and discrimination of all kinds. These are not negotiable stances, and we're not particularly willing to entertain people who disagree on those points, but we have a radical humility as to the means. Uh, I'm not smart enough. I'm not wise enough. My experiences are not broad enough for me to be able to read a particular writer and say the way you're trying to do this as wrong. I lack that kind of wisdom.
Speaker 3 00:39:58 And so I'm in the business of publishing people who might disagree. Uh, that's what I do every day. I talk to a broad set of writers on my team of editors. And we try to find people who have really smart and provocative and interesting ways to talk about the means, because we don't know what the right means are. And if we can be committed to a common set of ends, if we can say, we want this, this Republican under, if we can say, we want this society to be more just then we can have Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and liberals and libertarians and socialists and, and people of all political ideologies and all backgrounds come in debate in our pages because they to share commitment to those ends, they can disagree quite profoundly as to the proper means of attending them, but we can still have that conversation. And so our path to this pluralistic project is to keep those ends fixed in our side at all times, because it's the commitment to those ends, which enables so many different disagreeing voices to debate the means.
Speaker 1 00:40:57 Well, thank you all so much for listening to our show today and special, thanks to Yoni Applebaum ideas, editor of the Atlantic for being with us in general, but especially here today to talk about these critical questions for America, for Jews and for our shared future identity crisis is a product of the shell department Institute and partnership with the Jewish telegraphic agency was produced this week by Devinsky comment and Tali Cohen and edited by Tali Cohen with assistance from MIRI Miller and music provided by so-called to learn more about the Shalom Hartman Institute, visit us online, Shalom, hartman.org. We want to know what you think about our show. You can rate and review us on iTunes to help more people discover the show. Then you can also write to us that
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