This week, Roger welcomes Dr. Joshua Mitchell, a professor of political theory at Georgetown University. They discuss the perils of identity politics, the meaning of the material, blank and spiritual economies, and the need for a return to competence and community engagement. Dr. Mitchell also shares firsthand insight on the state of higher education and the ever-growing fear of free and open dialog among students.
Dr. Joshua Mitchell is one of the world’s leading experts on Alexis de Tocqueville and has written widely on a range of subjects, most recently on identity politics. He has also authored several books, his most recent one being, “American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time.”
Dr. Mitchell has also taught several courses in political philosophy at TFAS programs, both in the U.S. and Prague.
Episode Transcript
The transcript below is lightly edited for clarity.
Roger Ream [00:00:02] Welcome to the Liberty + Leadership Podcast a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty and friends who are making an impact today. I’m your host, Roger Ream. Today I’m very excited to welcome Dr. Joshua Mitchell. Dr. Mitchell is a professor of political theory at Georgetown University and has taught several courses in political philosophy at TFAS, past programs both in the U.S. and at our international program in Prague. Joshua Mitchell has written widely on a range of subjects, most recently on identity politics. Dr. Mitchell is one of the world’s leading experts on Alexis de Tocqueville and has applied the wisdom of Tocqueville and other great thinkers to many of the problems of today. Josh is the author of several books, his most recent one being “American Awakening: Identity, Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time.” His previous book, “Tocqueville in Arabia” has just been re-released by Encounter books with a new introduction. Josh, welcome to the show.
Joshua Mitchell [00:01:13] Good to see you, Roger.
Roger Ream [00:01:15] I want to discuss the insights contained in your most recent book” American Awakening,” but I’d like to first begin with your previous book “Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age,” which you published in 2013. And now, I understand, is coming out again through Encounter Books with a new introduction, which I’m looking forward to reading. The themes in both books really tie together and they focus on identity, how Democratic man has become disconnected in a world of unbounded freedom, the concepts of death and guilt, redemption, innocence. So, let me begin by asking just a general question about the origins of your thoughts on these themes. Did they start the day you sat down in graduate school with a copy of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America? Or do you trace them more to your experiences in Qatar and Iraq and a Georgetown University and more contemporary events taking place?
Joshua Mitchell [00:02:12] It’s a great question. So, my father was foreign service, and we grew up in the Middle East. I say that with a little caution. It was really my formative years till I was about seven, and then I come back to the United States, and I realize, I’m obviously an English native speaker, I realize there’s something deep here that that’s different than the Middle East. I think it took me decades to formulate it, but it was this Christian underpinning. So, I’ve always had a theological interest, and in graduate school, I was admitted both to divinity school and to political science department and chose the political science department only because I had greater freedom, but I kept taking religion courses. So, that’s the first thing. The second thing I would say is I finished up my graduate program and with great embarrassment, I say I had never read “Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,” and I was asked to teach a course the following semester at the place where I had finished up, University of Chicago. I thought: “Okay, I better read this book, Democracy in America.” I read the author’s introduction, which is 11 pages long, and took me 3.5 hours. I thought: “No, I’m going to really pay attention to this,” and I closed that book, and I thought to myself: “Well, you’re now going to spend the rest of your life with this book.” That was 1989. And so, he’s been my constant companion. And then I would add, just very briefly, I became deeply troubled by what was happening in the academic field of political science, political theory in general, that the great authors of the 20th century and political theory had come out of World War II, and they were trying to understand the world, and what was happening by the time the late 80s and 90s rolled around in the academic world was that people were losing track of the world and getting involved in secondary and tertiary literature. Just getting completely lost in this and forgetting that we have a world out there to explain. I became so discouraged that I had an opportunity to go and be on Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service startup team in Qatar in 2005. I left, Roger. I wanted to step into administration, get back on the ground, build something. And I realized within three months of being there that Tocqueville’s question, which is: “What is the transition from the aristocratic age the Democratic age looked like” was being played out right in front of me, in Qatar. I was deeply dissatisfied with the language of Islamic fundamentalism, which is the way we had named it since 2001. I thought: “No, that’s not enough. We need to come up with a comprehensive framework to understand this.” I concluded then and here we are almost 12 years later, Roger, and I have the same view that Tocqueville understood that there’s a wrestling match going on around the world, this movement from what he called the aristocratic past to the Democratic present. I see this in the young people all around the globe.
Roger Ream [00:05:06] Yeah, well, those insights are in Tocqueville, in Arabia, and anyone listening should get a hold of that book now reissued through Encounter with a new introduction. But I’d like to move to your more recent book, “American Awakening.” In that book, as well as some other recent essays that you’ve written, and first things that elsewhere you describe two economies: the material economy, where we have this great abundance, all the riches and comforts that’s provided, and then what you describe as the invisible economy, the more spiritual economy. I thought it best to start with you kind of describing those two economies, and then we’ll move more into the important themes that you bring out in that book.
Joshua Mitchell [00:05:48] Let me add, there’s a third one, too. So, part of what I’m deeply concerned about, Roger, is that I don’t think the left understands what it’s doing. It’s deeply involved in identity politics, but I don’t think there’s a self-conscious understanding what’s happening. The right wants to understand what’s happening. As I say, there and elsewhere, the twin understandings of debt, the two economies, as I call them, that conservatives understand are let’s call it the free market economy, the economy of payment. And the other economy is the one in which we have a debt and a payment, so to speak, to our fathers, and that’s tradition. I think the conservative movement has been held together tenuously by those two traditions. Let’s call it the free-market tradition and the traditionalists and oftentimes in tension now, but they banded together because of the twin threat of progressivism and communism abroad. I mean, there was unanimity, and I think that’s split apart a little bit now, but my point in “American Awakening” is that there is a third economy. It’s what I call the spiritual economy. It’s invisible. The Bible has it throughout. So, Judas, for example, is the Treasurer for the Apostles, and he’s concerned about paying money, gathering money to have a revolution. He’s a social justice warrior and when the oil is poured out on Jesus, Judas is thinking dollars and cents and Christ says the poor will always be with us, this is important, there’s another economy, here’s what he’s announcing, and Judas doesn’t understand this, which is why he betrays him. So, the story of the baby in the manger. There are so many instances in the Bible where there’s another, a deeper understanding of a spiritual economy, and that’s the foundation of Christianity. My argument is that identity politics taps into this deep understanding of debt, a spiritual debt. Christians would call it original sin, and that would then have to be resolved in your relationship to God. And then Protestants and Catholics are going to disagree about the place of the church in that reconciliation, but my argument is the churches have failed us. And what’s happened is this deeper need to think in terms of spiritual debt has now spilled out and into the public, and it’s taken the form of identity politics. My view is a healthy economy, a healthy working economy, a free market can only transpire if we’ve relegated this spiritual economy to the churches. When it spills out, then people say goofy things about what we’re supposed to do in the world. So, AOC and the left will say: “Well, of course we have to spend $50 trillion to clean up America, to clean up the environment, to be pure because the whole green economy it’s a theological concept of purity versus dirty fossil fuel.” So, unless we’re able to get right where the spiritual economy belongs and what it can do, it spills out into the political scene, and that’s really the great debate now, because the left says: “We don’t care about cost. We have no concern about cost because the real economy is not the money economy of debt and borrowing, the real economy is the economy of spiritual cleanliness.” And so, that’s the Titanic battle we’re involved in. The way I put it in the book is we have two ways forward. We can either do what I call the politics of innocence and transgression, which is this politics of spiritual debt, or we can do what I call the politics of competence, and the American regime is based on that. Adam Smith is based on that, Tocqueville’s based on that, and that’s really the titanic choice we have in front of us, and if we don’t return to the politics of competence, which has all sorts of implications for affirmative action, and DEI, you know those, and if we don’t return to that, we’re doomed because nature is only going to put up with this, or history is only going to put up with this or Providence is going to put up with this, for so long. Because if you don’t have competence, you’re going to have foreign powers are going to overrun you, and that’s the final threat here.
Roger Ream [00:10:14] You make an interesting distinction in your writing about this identity politics and contrast it with progressivism, because as you point out, the problem today in the left isn’t progressivism, because progressivism in some sense is ruled by elites. It has to pay some lip service to competence of a kind, but you point out that it’s not that the left wants the experts to rule, they want the innocents to rule. I think it’s the way you put it. You make a strong statement there. You say the left does not want to strengthen America; it wishes to destroy it. Could you expand on that thought process there? Your thoughts?
Joshua Mitchell [00:10:52] So, the way I characterize America, is in terms of three phases. The first phase, which is the one Tocqueville, and the founders were thinking about, was a regime of citizen competence, decentralized government insofar as that’s possible. You count on citizens to become competent through their mediating institutions, which the state has little control over. In the late 1800s, late 1880s or so, you get Woodrow Wilson and others beginning to say: “Well, it’s too complicated. Democracy is too complicated. We need to have experts running the regime.” And so, that moves us into the second phase of American history, which is progressivism. It’s expert competence. It’s still competence. We should be clear about this. It’s a belief that you need to have competence. But the argument is that citizens aren’t up to it, so we’re going to have experts, and I don’t like that, but it’s at least a continuation of the idea that you have to have competence. And what I’ve noticed in the past 20, 30 years, 20 years in higher education is that we’re not training experts anymore. To get through higher education, you have to demonstrate that you are going to abide by this politics of innocence and transgression, or the shorthand is identity politics. Identity politics is concerned with one thing. It’s concerned with establishing purity and stain and purging the stain. So, critical race theory, for example, and DEI are about calling out what they call white privilege. And to do this, you have to go back centuries. I mean, Marxism called out the oppressors, but it had nothing to do with their past. It had to do simply with what class they’re in right now. Identity politics needs to do a deep dive on your history and mine, everybody’s history to show that, in fact, that there’s a group of people who are irredeemably stained. This is deeply theological, and the problem with the irredeemable stain is there’s no way out. And so, what identity politics wish to do, since these people can’t be brought back into the fold, they have to be canceled, this is how we get the language of cancellation, it tries to purge and uses the medical model. So, there’s toxic masculinity. This is a medical model or a psychological model of heteronormativity, homophobia, Islamophobia. These are claims about sickness and health, not about ideas that one should talk about, but literally about who’s pure, who’s poisoned, how we clean up the social body. And so, this is very, very dangerous. It’s a continuation of Marxism. This is why I say to my colleagues everywhere: “We can’t think of it quite as Marxism, but what it does, like Marxism is it identifies a group that has to be purged.” And I say to my students and to my colleagues that I’m very worried that we’re in the very early innings of a new kind of thing. It’s not Marxism, but it’s like Marxism and that it wishes to purge. This could go on for 100 years. And we have to remember that the death toll with Marxism was 100 million people. And we haven’t really begun to see the full implications of purgation. Just to carry this further, and I do say this in the book, as you know, I think the full implications of identity politics is transhumanism, because the problem is the human being is sustained just by virtue of having, say, a carbon footprint or by desiring to reproduce. I mean, all this produces a toxin on the earth. If carbon is a poison, which is deeply dubious from a biological standpoint, then the only implication is that we have to move beyond the human form because humanity itself is poisoned and there’s a movement within identity politics doing that. So, identity politics is to think only in terms of purity and stain. I characterize it as a great awakening under purity and stain without God and without forgiveness. So, we’re involved in the biggest religious movement we’ve had, I’d say, since the 1820s, but there’s no reconciliation. There’s no forgiveness. There’s no atonement. It’s incredibly dangerous. Roger.
Roger Ream [00:15:03] To take that a little further. In your in your book, you talk about these incomplete religions that have replaced Christianity. I think you say Tocqueville predicted this development in his writings, and we look now to man for redemption instead of to God. Is that the correct understanding of that? What are these incomplete religions?
Joshua Mitchell [00:15:24] So, I don’t know, Roger, I can’t remember honestly, I may have used the term in passing in “American Awakening,” but I will say in the several years since then, I’ve thought a lot more about this term. So, in “Democracy in America,” Tocqueville tells us that man is a religious animal, and you can try to erase it, it will never go away. So, he writes that in 1840, and then he never finishes his great work on the French Revolution called “The Old Regime in the French Revolution,” but in the first few chapters of that book, he’s done a lot of thinking since writing Democracy in America. He says: “You would be wise to understand that the French Revolution is not a political revolution. It is an incomplete religion, and it aims, as Christianity did for universalism. It seeks to establish who the pure and who the stained are.” So, Tocqueville gives us late in his life this category of the incomplete religions, and I take it from there and in my argument is that we don’t move from the Christian world to the secular world. This is a great mistake that I think conservatives need to rectify. Tocqueville’s brilliant insight is that we move from the Christian age to an age of incomplete religions because the longing to work through purity and staying, the longing for redemption is in the human soul. And so, if Christianity falters for one reason or another, then what you’re going to have been incomplete religions that appear and make moral claims. So, for example, the French Revolution was the first and complete religion. Marxism, whose toll was 100 million, was the second great incomplete religion. And my argument is that we are on the cusp of this third one, identity politics, because there too, you’ve got the Christian category of irredeemable stain. You have the Christian category of the scapegoat. But what makes it extraordinarily dangerous is that whereas for the Christian, you admit that you have a stain that so deep within you that God himself has to come to the rescue. That’s an incredible insight right there, but all of us around the world, irrespective of our different social standings and what we have done and received at the hands of other people, all of us bear this stain and only the divine redeemer can heal the sins of the world. So, the world can only be made pure through the divine act of self-sacrifice. But what we have with identity politics is the taking of this, I call it a vertical relationship between the divine and man, and turns it on its side, makes it a horizontal relationship in the following form. We, the defenders of identity politics, have the audacity to make declarations about who is pure and who was stained. And you can establish exactly what your moral standing is by going to look up your intersectionality score. So, the prime transgressor, as I call him in in American Awakening, is the white heterosexual male. Let’s add Christian. The question of the Jews, that’s a very interesting question, which October 7th is race. We can talk about that later. But you need a prime transgressor. This is the key because it’s only through the prime transgressor that everybody else can establish their relative standing. So, for example, this seemingly innocuous term, people of color is actually disgusting and repulsive because it presumes that there’s an alliance between all groups who are not white because they’re not white. White is stained. And we people of color, despite our differences, have this one thing in common that we are the innocent victims. It’s deeply, deeply pernicious. Let me carry on just for a second. The problem and there are many problems with this. One, no peoples ever make advances, if they keep blaming others for their troubles does not happen. And I work closely with Bob Woodson, who says that the idea of the innocent victim in black America is the is probably the most pernicious idea of all that stopping black America from moving on. So, we can talk about that, too. But the problem is you’ve got this need to purge. With Christianity, there’s a divine scapegoat that takes away the world, but when you turn this vertical understanding on its side, then you need to go out and identify people. And the first group that’s been identified, we all know this very well, is the white heterosexual male and all that he has accomplished. And so, to come back to your earlier point, identity politics is out for the destruction of everything that the prime transgressor has brought about, and that would be the U.S. Constitution. It would be free markets, it would be Republican government, it would be any number of Christianity, it would be any number of these things. So, the prime transgressor and all that he’s responsible for must be purged. This is not a project of construction. The progressive believe that they can make a better America. You know, the great book of the Progressives is called “The Promise of American Life.” They might have been wrong, but that’s what they believed. So, we have a big problem with identity politics.
Roger Ream [00:20:40] And they’ve had this whole concept of colonizers. Lately has been a new concept which places a lot of us in that category of transgression.
Joshua Mitchell [00:20:50] And that’s an incomplete religion, too. So, the post postcolonial literature, it draws on Marxism. Maybe it’s incomplete Religion 2.3 or something, and identity politics is 3.0. But there’s a great temptation to use these easygoing terms. When you have these easygoing terms, Roger, it doesn’t matter that the concert goers were slaughtered and raped, because if you’re a colonizer, if you’re an oppressor, you deserve death. We have to be very clear on this. There’s no moral nuance whatsoever within these incomplete religions, which is why Stalin could just say: “Yeah, we’re going to slaughter 40 million Soviets.” It’s just that’s what we’re supposed to do because they’re impure.
Roger Ream [00:21:29] You have commented in several places I know about the problems that some of these problems are on the alt right as well, and you see it sometimes on the right. Could you comment on that?
Joshua Mitchell [00:21:41] Yeah. So, just a quick passage from Tocqueville that I love. At the end of the author’s introduction, he says: “While the parties have busied themselves with tomorrow, I’ve tried to see the whole the future.” So, what he sees is that in this new age, this new Democratic age, you’re going to have splinters on either side. And my concern on the right is that that there are very smart people on the right who have their finger on the pulse of identity politics, and they know what needs to be done, and that’s fantastic news, because I don’t think we get back to a kind of Tocqueville liberal regime. And I don’t mean that in the sense of leftism. I don’t think we get back to it until we can get rid of identity politics, but the alt right option is one that a lot of young man in America, I think may be even more so in Europe, are very tempted by and we have to understand what it is at a very deep level. You can talk about Richard Spencer and others and say they’re members of the alt right. And no doubt there are people who self-identify as alt right, just as there are people on the left who identify themselves as communists and progressives, and they’re not. We have to think deeply about what the alt right is. And the person who you would need to look to is Nietzsche, who very consciously set out this what we’ll call an alt right alternative, and I need to explain how we thought this through. In his book called “The Genealogy of Morals,” in the second essay, he asked, I’ll paraphrase, he asked the following question: “How can you have a tomorrow?” Now he knows what the Christian answer is. The Christian answer is: “Look, we’re all stained, we’re all broken. We do terrible things. And if we had to bear this weight, eternally or for a long time, we would get to the place where we would be frightened to do anything for fear of its consequences.” And he wasn’t defending this, but he said the amazing thing about Christianity was: “You’re forgiven. There’s atonement, there’s repentance. And so, the whole of history is bloodshed and violence. And yet we go on with hope that all this can be put behind us and we move toward a redeemed world.” And he said: “Well, that’s how the West was won. That’s how Europe prevailed in the world as they were no purer or more anymore impure than anyone else, but they had this amazing way of having a tomorrow.” And he thought that the current moment in Europe, I’ll get to the alt right in one second, the current moment in Europe involved this this haunting situation in which Christianity was faltering, and Europeans still had debt. And so, let me bring this up to the 20th century. All of a sudden, the legacy of colonialism, two world wars, the Holocaust, this is a lot of weight to bear. And if Christianity is there, you say praise God, you repent. Who knows what kind of world we could have had if Christianity was intact, because Christianity is not for the faint of heart, it starts from blood violence, Cain and Abel. But it says: “Nevertheless, there’s a way forward.” It’s amazing thing. But what Nietzsche saw was that Christianity was faltering and the weight of transgression was weighing ever more heavily. And in America, I would add, as the churches are faltering after World War II, we have TV pictures of young black kids being hosed down in the South. And so, we have the weight and the guilt of slavery being shown to us, and yet the churches can’t do anything about it. So, what Nietzsche thought would happen was that the West would slowly die. And I think in this, he’s pretty accurate. How? We would be so terrified and frightened by all that we had done and all that we might do, and so we would just stop. There would be no more ambitious space programs. I mean, why have we not gone back to the moon after 50 years, right? We would not believe that free markets are good things because what about the poor people? The cost is too high of taking any risk. And that, as you know, is someone who teaches, Adam Smith. You cannot move forward without there being collateral damage, and the belief that once that collateral damage happens, there’s a way to auto correct. It’s not final. That’s the whole point about markets. So, he thought that we would get to the place where the West would just shut down. So, he asked the question: “Ao how can you have a tomorrow?” And he said: “Well, now there’s only one way for it, and that is to forget.” And what he means by this is that you would look on all the horrible things that your history shows: slavery, colonialism, two world wars, the Holocaust and say: “We don’t care. We just don’t care.” And that is a very understandable position that a lot of young men take because they are told you have irredeemable stain. There is nothing you can do to erase it. And for that reason, they say we’re taking nature’s path. We don’t care. We will not take upon ourselves any guilt whatsoever. And I have to tell you from my own position, which is the Christian position, I don’t want to get rid of guilt, but it cannot be that we are put on this earth to feel guilty and die. It cannot be that. It must be, and I believe it is, that we are going to be involved in all sorts of transgressions, some greater, some less. And we are given an opportunity every single day to to atone for this repent and start anew. But when you have a generation of young men who are told that because they’re white, they are permanently toxic and must be purged. I understand why they go to the niche and alt right and it’s a terrible way to go, but the left with identity politics has brought this upon itself. That’s what they don’t understand. They have caused this.
Roger Ream [00:27:50] Well, let me ask you to comment on the state of higher education in this country. We saw this past academic year, the rise of anti-Semitism, the protest from the left and our colleges at universities built these days around identity politics. Se don’t have to recite all the things that going on in the university. I’ve heard you talk about, and I think it’s in your books as well, this ritual of Passover, innocence signaling, I think you call it, too. Can you talk about that and what your thoughts are on the university today? I mean, there are a few, very few exceptions, but it’s a sad state of affairs.
Joshua Mitchell [00:28:30] Yeah, Hillsdale, Dallas, a few others, but almost all of them have been captured. So, I don’t use the term virtue signaling because virtue is of Greek origin, but the category of innocence and victimhood is is a biblical category. And so, we are deeply involved in the biblical category of innocence signaling, not virtue signaling. But let’s talk about what that means. So, there’s a Jewish Passover ritual is one in which God says: “Paint the blood of an innocent lamb on the lintel of your door, i.e. make it visible outside of the home and and death will pass you by.” And my argument is today in America, at a time when competence is rapidly collapsing and we should do everything we can to rebuild competence through our mediating institutions, through our universities, we’re not interested in incompetence. We are practicing a variant of the Jewish Passover ritual every single day, multiple times a day. What we’re looking for is a way to avoid social death. The term is cancellation, but we need to think of this as a theological phenomenon. People put Black Lives Matter signs in their front yard or this office green or whatever it happens to be, something on their door to indicate that social death or cancellation should pass them by. And what’s so deeply pernicious about this? Let me just speak about this with respect to black America, is that it does nothing. It just allows you to be left in peace so that you don’t have to do anything. And there are problems and there’s ways to constructively talk about race in America, which completely bypasses this innocent victimhood stuff. The left looks at black America as the key, as the foundation stone for its entire project, because what the left has done is it looks at black America and it sees innocent victims. And Bob Woodson tells me, in the 1950s, when this idea began to circulate in black political culture that maybe they could take the standing of the innocent victim, a lot of black leaders said under no circumstances where we do this. So, the category, the innocent victim was one that was put upon black Americans and Summit wanted it, I suppose, but it was a superimposition. And what the left then did was it said: “Well, okay, black America is the basis for the whole idea of innocent victimhood.” And then it added on top of this women’s rights, women’s rights as a continuation of civil rights. And then the argument as civil rights goes to women’s rights. So, it goes to gay and lesbian rights, and so now to transgender rights. And so, what’s happened is that black America has been used, in my view, to get ahead. Now, how do I see this on campus for all these other groups to get ahead? It’s very interesting, Roger. I have conservative black students at Georgetown and they are very circumspect because the sick and twisted thing about identity politics and black America is that if you are a black American and you want to get ahead in it, in this crazy world in which identity politics is the hall pass, you literally have to say things like: “I don’t know what a woman is.” And that ought to sound familiar, right? The Supreme Court justice, the woman who could not say what a woman is, because if you’re going to get ahead, you have to let all these other groups piggyback on you. Feminism, gay and lesbian rights and transgender rights, and I will say right now that if you want to separate those things, go ahead and talk about them, but the violence done here is to piggyback on the wound of black America. Sol to come to a larger question about universities. Look, my kids, they are being taught that there’s a certain way you have to speak, a certain way you have to think, if not, you’re going to be canceled. We have a free speech policy at Georgetown, which is robust, but that’s not where the cancellation is happening. It’s happening over social media. The Lord of the Flies jungle that the students are living in is not on campus. It’s in their social media, Instagram and TikTok and all the rest. So, we have a horrible intellectual environment. Roger, the day after the Hamas attacks on October 7th, I said to my class of 30: “I’d like to hear your views on what happened.” You could hear a pin drop. I have never seen in my 35 years of teaching more fear of speaking candidly, ever, never. They are petrified to speak. And this is why, whatever you might think of Kamala Harris, the regime that has been moving forward in this direction since, I would say the 2010, the beginning the second half of the Obama term, I think that’s when it really started to happen. It’s a steamroller and it has to be stopped or else there’ll be no free speech at university. Quick story. I was in Iraq for two years, as you know, as the chancellor of the American University of Iraq and Kurdistan, and my kids had gone through a civil war and a lot of them had weapons, and I said to them: “Look, you have to leave your AK 47 in the trunk of your car out in the parking lot. The university is the only known institution in the universe where we have to sit down and have difficult conversations.” And they got that. My students in America don’t get that. They’re scared to death to speak.
Roger Ream [00:34:11] Wow. That’s really something. I will say that we caught up recently with a student who was in your class at TFAS, who’s now at Columbia University, and he said your course continues to have a great impact on him. I know there are many more like him. His name was Adam. He talked about how profound the experience was in your class. I hope at TFAS classes you bring the students out and they aren’t shy about talking, but I would guess you must hear from students from your classes who maybe privately communicate with you about how refreshing it is to have a professor like you and have the conversations that you have in your classes.
Joshua Mitchell [00:34:54] They come to my office, Roger, and close the door. And they say: “Well, I actually believe a lot of things you’re you have the courage or the nerve to say, but I could never see them in class.” The interesting thing that’s happened in the last two semesters, though, which I have to note, I think a lot of students are starting to wake up. It’s been very interesting. And even students on the left. So, I teach a class called Conservatism Radicals once a year. And the first day I say: “Okay, here’s the story. There will be no choreographed conversations about men and women, about race. I don’t want to hear about them. We’re going have difficult conversations, and you’re going to say things that you never dared to say and probably going to be overstepping and over overstating things. And then it’s going to be okay because that’s what he universities for.” So, I think students are realizing that identity politics it’s not defensible at all, but you can say maybe 1 or 2 sentences about it. And then after that, you realize there’s not there. So, certainly the students on the right are hungry for a language which allows them to understand what’s happening. And the way I put it to them is it’s an incomplete religion, and the only the only way you battle an incomplete religion is with a complete religion. And so, my view is it’s only with the awakening of Christianity anew, and I have no idea how that happens. But I think that’s the only antidote to this. And on the left, it’s been very interesting, too. Some of my smartest students on the left, they come and close the door, and they say: “Well, look, I believe these things, but, boy, you depart one iota from the orthodoxy, and you’re done.” And let me say one other thing. What’s been interesting for me to watch, Roger, is guys my age, so late 60s, early 70s, former Democrats. I grew up in the Democratic Party, really until Reagan. I was a staunch Democrat. But a lot of them are starting to speak up. And they from four decades, I would argue with them and say: “You don’t understand what you fought for in the 1960s is not what’s happening now.” And they say: “No, it’s going to be okay.” I think October 7th was a wakeup call to a lot of guys on the old left, and they realize: “Well, wait a second here. We’re really don’t want to chant things like from the river to the sea. This is not the left.” So, I think some of the old left is waking up. The guy I haven’t spoken to for a couple of years is Joel Kotkin. I mean, Joel Kotkin is a Democrat, a Brooklyn Democrat, probably a few years older than me. It’s been very interesting to see his eyes open. He realizes this is a death cult. I mean, he wouldn’t dare put it that way, but that’s what we’re faced with, is a culture of death. And it’s going to take a lot to get it back and in the universities. It’s going to be a long haul. I sometimes wonder whether it’s going to be possible to do this within the university. You’re aware of these burgeoning civic centers that are happening around the world. And I will remind you of a conversation. You and I and Randy had our journey many years ago about the need to start up a new university, and I think that’s a lot of people are realizing that. It’s just not clear that the disciplinary guilds within the universities are going to come out of their tailspin and maybe we have to start over. It’s a frightening thought, but there are a lot of wonderful young people who got enough of an education to realize they have to keep on and they’re hungry. I think there’s this huge demographic late 20s to mid-forties of people who want now to have a real education, the sort they didn’t really get.
Roger Ream [00:38:40] Yeah, it was just a week ago with the director of the new center at University of North Carolina, and it’s refreshing to hear that. Like you, they’re setting up the classroom for these candid conversations among students from the left and right in the middle where they have Chatham House rules. They can speak in the classroom and have these vigorous conversations. It is refreshing in their other schools as well. So, hopefully that’ll make some difference and perhaps have some influence on more traditional departments over time. I guess we have time for one more question and you can take it. It’s a short question. I’ll preface that by saying we’re recording this just two weeks before the U.S. election. This isn’t about the election. It’s more broad question of just do you find reasons for optimism about the future and if so, where?
Joshua Mitchell [00:39:36] I do, but I should say that I think we’re still on the downward slope of the curve. But I’m nevertheless optimistic because I think people are beginning to realize we’re on the downward slope of the curve, that we’ve made this huge investment in our own lives. And as a society in in digital technology, which is which is a global technology, and we’ve lost sight of everyday interactions and why those are life sustaining. And I say to my students: “Okay, so here are the rules for the class. You have to cancel all your social media and then you’ll be healthy and then we can talk, and they’re petrified of this. I say, I’m looking at a group of addicts and addiction just gets worse until it gets better. And so, I think we’re getting to the place where people are realizing the digital panacea. It will not feed us that we are embodied creatures. This is why I am a Tocqueville scholar. Roger, we’re embodied creatures. We can only find the nourishment we need in the immediate situation around us that the answers to. To sound like Bob Watson for a minute. The answers to all the problems we see have. They’re there locally. We don’t have to swoop in there. The answers are there to be found. We just have to look for them in our local community. So, I think we’re getting to the point where we’re having a digital hangover, and I think once that breaks, then I think people will begin to open their eyes and say: “Okay, this is not working.” This has been an addiction. It’s a high and a low, and we have to find something that’s not both a high and a low, but is sustainable on a daily basis. And so, I have a hope that that will happen. I’m not sure exactly when it’s going to happen, but I see the fatigue in my students. They know that the answers they’ve been given are not working and they’re so unhappy.
Roger Ream [00:41:26] Yeah, I’ve heard you say before, you’ve told them, you’ve warned them that Facebook is death.
Joshua Mitchell [00:41:32] Yes. That’s a lecture I give.
Roger Ream [00:41:34] Yeah. Well, Josh’s book is “American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Reflections of Our Time,” published in 2020. I understand you’re working on another book. Is that right? On the subject of hope.
Joshua Mitchell [00:41:48] All of my books lately have been secretly about hope, but this one’s called “The Gentle Seduction of Tyranny,” and what I’m looking at is this phenomenon of, I think so many of us feel like we’re being pulled headlong into this new and very dangerous social environment where human freedom is being squelched and renounced. And so, I’m going to Tocqueville, who I think saw already in the 1840s that there were all sorts of reasons why the state was going to grow stronger and stronger. And the subtitle was “20 Reasons Why the State Grow Stronger,” and he saw this in the 1830. Long before the progressives arose. So, there are habits of mind that he warns us about, envy, all sorts of things that we need to pay attention to. So, I think that unless we change our habits of mind, there’s no national solution to our problems. We have to do the hard work.
Roger Ream [00:42:42] I look forward to that book and hopefully we can have a book party and have you back on the Liberty + Leadership Podcast. Thank you for the time you’ve committed to teaching our students and courses here in Washington, D.C., and overseas in Prague. I’ll look forward to having you at a TFAS program again soon, and thanks for joining me today, Josh.
Joshua Mitchell [00:43:00] My pleasure.
Roger Ream [00:43:02] Thank you for listening to the Liberty + Leadership Podcast. If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast@TFAS.org and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five-star review. Liberty + Leadership is produced at Podville Media. I’m your host Roger Ream, and until next time, show courage in things large and small.
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