Liberty and the Puritan strain in America
In a discussion of American sexual politics, Bob Zadek described two opposed traditions in the United States: the tradition of liberty going back to the Founding Fathers and to philosophical and classical liberalism, and the Puritan settlers who sought to build a society on Christian principles. On Bob’s account, these two threads run through American history, and over the first couple of centuries the puritanical streak grew stronger America, The Most Sexually Hypocritical Nation on Earth (2014).
The same episode placed the criminalization of prostitution in this light. Bob said that through much of the history of civilization, including in the church, prostitution was accepted as necessary and was almost never criminalized, and that in the early days of the country prostitution was not a crime; he dated its criminalization to the beginning of the 20th century. Guest Maggie McNeill agreed that it was considered a sin in Christian thought, but described the medieval church’s view as that of a lesser sin that prevented a greater sin. She said that in the 13th century the church began making it possible for prostitutes to leave that sin, and even encouraged men to marry prostitutes for a while. She also described laws that were intended less to stop prostitution than to segregate “good women” from “bad women”—sumptuary laws requiring prostitutes to wear a certain color, including a time in Roman history when all prostitutes had to wear yellow America, The Most Sexually Hypocritical Nation on Earth (2014).
Feminism and the libertarian lineage
David Boaz told Bob that libertarians believe in equal freedom under law for every person, and that this includes women even though most countries did not recognize it until recently. He named Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written around 1800, as one of the first important feminist books, and said she made her case for women’s rights in the terms of classical liberalism and libertarianism—equal rights, individual rights, natural rights, freedom from government restrictions. He also said that many women involved in the abolitionist movement began to think that if black men had the same rights as white men, women should have those rights too, so that part of the feminist movement grew out of abolitionism David Boaz on The Libertarian Mind (2015).
Boaz offered one way of dating the modern libertarian movement: in 1943, three women wrote books that gelled and presented the libertarian philosophy—Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine, and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, which Rand wrote over about ten years but published in 1943. Those books began getting an audience that produced an ideological and intellectual movement, followed the next year by Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and a couple of years later by the creation of the first libertarian think tank. Bob characterized feminism as having almost a parallel lineage with libertarianism in America, with feminists joined philosophically by core libertarian concepts David Boaz on The Libertarian Mind (2015).
The gathering storm
Law professor John McGinnis wrote a blog post titled “The Gathering Storm for Classical Liberalism,” which Bob used as the frame for an episode evaluating the state of liberty in America. McGinnis said the gathering storm against classical liberalism was not due entirely, or indeed mostly, to the president, but had been gathering for some time: universities, and particularly elite universities of the kind at which he teaches, have faculties wholly antithetical to liberal and classical liberal ideas, with the left in complete ascendancy and an orthodoxy in which the best and brightest students are brought up. He invoked Keynes’s remark that statesmen may think they are original but are always parroting the ideas of some defunct economist, and said professors’ ideas have consequences even when they are not indoctrinating Here Comes the Storm (2019).
McGinnis also attributed part of the storm to the president. He said Trump had done a variety of good things for liberty, but that partly because of his persona he had increased polarization in the country, and that this contributed, along with the transmission belt of ideas from higher educational institutions, to the movement of the Democratic Party to a more left party. He said the Democratic Party had always been to the left of the Republican Party but had not generally been a truly left party that called into question some of the central ideas of the American founding, and he called Bernie Sanders running as a socialist a sea change, noting Sanders’s odds on the prediction markets and saying he would consider Kamala Harris not really that different from Sanders. McGinnis said he was not so much worried about Trump’s policies, though he had reservations about some of them for liberty, as about what likely comes afterwards, and that he was not confident Trump would capture the swing voters necessary to remain in the White House in 2020 Here Comes the Storm (2019).
Transactional politics and founding principles
Bob offered McGinnis the observation that Trump is frequently described as transactional—a substitute for pragmatism, making decisions ad hoc rather than from a core set of values or a creed—and said there is no indication of what Trump believes as a matter of principle. Bob said this led him to be concerned about the loss in the country of founding principles, which he said are what gives American exceptionalism its power. McGinnis agreed and compared Trump to Reagan, who from ‘76 to ‘80 went around the country writing speeches trying to imply Hayek’s ideas, whereas Trump’s background as a real estate operator from New York could not be more transactional Here Comes the Storm (2019).
McGinnis nonetheless identified two sources of hope. The first was Trump’s decision to commit himself to appointing judges who will read the Constitution as written—originalist judges—which he said matters not only because such judges are more likely to get decisions right, but because of a long theory of the Supreme Court going back to the early Republic that the justices are in some sense Republican schoolmasters who call the country to its founding principles. He said many justices have done the opposite, writing Roe v. Wade, which he described as made out of nothing and taking powers away from the states, but that originalist justices could be a great ally in imbuing the country with those principles again. He gave Trump enormous credit for the appointment of Gorsuch, who he said has turned out to be great, and said Kavanaugh was not yet known but there was reason to believe he would be quite good in this respect Here Comes the Storm (2019).
The second source of hope was Trump’s most recent State of the Union address, which McGinnis called a much greater improvement on the inaugural address precisely because it captured some principles, talking about the danger of socialism and the importance of freedom. Bob played a clip of Trump saying that socialism has bankrupted an oil-rich nation and driven its people into abject poverty, that virtually everywhere socialism or communism has been tried it has produced suffering, corruption, and decay, and that all nations should resist socialism and the misery it brings. Bob said the passage was right out of Hayek and the first time, in his knowledge, that Trump drilled down to a principle in support of his policies; McGinnis said one reason to think it continues is that giving government more power is not popular, and that if opportunism and principle coincide, Trump certainly will not oppose principle Here Comes the Storm (2019).
Criminal justice reform
Bob raised criminal justice reform as an area giving him great hope, noting that Rand Paul and Cory Booker had moved forward together on a first step in reform, and that Trump signed the bill. Bob said criminal justice reform matters because government is the only organization in the country that can lawfully use force, deprive people of liberty, lock them up for a long time and take away their property. McGinnis gave some credit but said most presidents would have had the bill on their desk and almost all would have signed it. He noted a caution: the power to jail people or take their money is an awesome power, but it is in some sense a core function of government, and some harsh criminal penalties were a response to substantial crime increases in the 1970s and 1980s that may have had their source in the decline of social norms. He said there have absolutely been excesses of those punishments, and that the most important thing is to punish criminals with certainty rather than give them sentences that put them into old-age homes. He contrasted this with tax reform, where he said it was essential that Trump be president rather than a Democrat, and that some Republicans would have been much more reluctant to sign such a substantial tax bill Here Comes the Storm (2019).
Across episodes: no development
The excerpts show classical liberalism touched in three episodes—a 2014 discussion of American sexual hypocrisy, a 2015 conversation with David Boaz on the libertarian mind, and a 2019 episode with John McGinnis on the gathering storm—but they do not show the same question argued across episodes, and no development between an earlier and later treatment can be traced from them.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not define classical liberalism systematically, nor do they name the statutes, amendments or holdings behind the criminal justice and judicial matters discussed. They do not state the outcome of the 2020 election or the later trajectory of the figures named. The 2014 excerpt breaks off mid-sentence in Bob’s discussion of the Progressive Movement and criminalization, and the 2019 excerpts break off at the start of further segments, so those portions are not summarized here.