ZadekpediaThe Brookings Institution enters The Bob Zadek Show not as a topic but as a credential. In three episodes spanning 2015 to 2021, Bob Zadek introduced guests by naming their affiliation with the institution, and in one case a guest described his own years there.
Jonathan Rauch on hate speech
In a January 2015 episode on free thought, Zadek introduced Jonathan Rauch as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, noting that he had written for the National Journal and The Atlantic, received a 2005 National Magazine Award, and was the author of The Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought Jonathan Rauch on the New Attacks on Free Thought (2015). Rauch’s argument was that allowing hate speech is good for America, and he offered his own life as evidence: he described himself as a gay American born into a country saturated with hatred and hate speech against gay people, most of it well-intentioned, and said the way to change a society’s mind is to identify the hate, confront the fears beneath it, and contrast the truth against it.
Rauch told Zadek that minorities are in the long term always safer in a society that protects hate speech than in one that protects them from hate speech, because such protections will be administered by political majorities to their own ends. He recalled that in the 1950s the people targeted by speech codes were gay people, that in 1953 the US Postmaster General censored the first openly gay intellectual magazine — an issue that was itself criticizing the Postmaster General’s censorship rules — and that in 1958 the Supreme Court, in a two-sentence decision, overturned that censorship and allowed gay people to speak. When they began speaking in the ’50s, he said, it was they who were called hateful and obscene, a threat to children and to society.
Zadek framed the discussion around a contrast: the United States is perhaps the only first-world country that does not prohibit hate speech as such, while most of Europe and Canada do. He put to Rauch that tolerance of gay Americans, socially and legally, would not have happened without permitted hate speech, and added that a free society exposes people to what makes them uncomfortable in the name of freedom. Rauch replied that Zadek had put it well and that it was hard to improve on it.
Jonathan Rothwell on inequality
In a November 2019 episode, Zadek introduced Jonathan Rothwell as Gallup’s principal economist and author of A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society Jonathan Rothwell on Market Egalitarianism (2019). Rothwell said he had worked at the Brookings Institution in DC for seven years before joining Gallup, and that he had been studying inequality for roughly twenty years, motivated initially by the 2000 election and Ralph Nader’s campaign talk about income inequality.
Rothwell’s substantive claim in the excerpt concerned scale: some income inequality is perfectly natural, but the United States stands out among democracies as having an extreme amount. In poor countries with authoritarian or corrupt governments, the richest 1% may control 20% to 30% of income in a given year; in European democracies and countries like Japan and Korea the figure is more like 6% to 12% or 13%, usually under 10%; in the United States it is 20%, closer to the authoritarian governments than to other developed countries. Zadek opened the episode with an extended analogy to Procrustes, the Greek mythological figure who stretched or amputated his victims to make everyone the same height, and asked whether politicians must take an oath to become Procrustean in their policy.
Clifford Winston on the legal profession
In a July 2021 episode, Zadek introduced Clifford Winston as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Economic Studies program and an applied microeconomist, there to discuss his book Trouble at the Bar Trouble at the Bar (2021). Zadek, describing himself as a practicing lawyer for 54 years, said the episode would examine what is wrong with the profession of law, and argued that the maladministration of the profession — not day-to-day practice but its regulation and organization — profoundly affects every American and the proper functioning of government. Winston thanked him for covering the topic.
Across episodes
The three episodes touch the institution only in introductions and one autobiographical aside: Rauch in 2015 and Winston in 2021 are both identified as senior fellows, Rothwell in 2019 as a former Brookings staffer of seven years. The episodes show no argument about Brookings advanced or answered across episodes, and no change in how the institution is treated.