Vital Interests: Sandy, thanks for joining us again on the Vital Interests forum. Our last conversation was about a year ago when we discussed the state of American democracy after four years of the Trump Administration. 

In this “sort of” post-Trump epoch - Trump is out of the White House but dominates Republican politics - it would be interesting to discuss what can be discerned about the evolving intellectual foundations of the Conservative Right. 

A recent article by Emma Green in The Atlantic focused on an interview she had with Ryan Williams, the president of the Claremont Institute. The Claremont Institute defines itself as a Conservative think tank with the mission “to restore the principles of the American Founding to the rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.” Their ambition is to map a political philosophy onto Trumpism. Let’s begin our discussion with your views on how the Conservative Movement is now defining itself.

Sandy Levinson: Inevitably, I think we need to begin with the 1619 project insofar as the Right has really glommed onto that as a primary threat to their representation of American history. I think that there is this absolutely fundamental split that is more and more apparent between those people who look back to 1776 and then 1787 as the two idealized founding moments in our history and those who advocate investigating a deeper interpretation of the founding of America. For Conservatives, if only we went back to the truths of the Declaration of Independence and to the original meaning of the Constitution, then everything would be all right.

Slowly but surely, there is now a critique of that particular kind of - for lack of a better word -  patriotism. I recently read a manuscript of an engaging forthcoming book The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story (Univ. of Chicago Press, April 2022) by Kermit Roosevelt III who teaches at University of Pennsylvania Law School. He argues absolutely forthrightly for junking the Declaration of Independence and the 1787 Constitution as our most sacred myths and symbols.

Noah Feldman has also just published an impressive new book, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America, in which he makes the case that Abraham Lincoln should be viewed as our founder and not the esteemed gentlemen of 1776 or 1787. I think there's a lot to both Roosevelt’s and Feldman’s ideas, but it's obviously traumatic for those Americans educated to view the Founders, capital F, as Thomas Jefferson once referred to them, as demigods. It might be particularly challenging, incidentally, if such suggestions come from someone who is in fact a part of the family that gave us two presidents!

The culture war has now moved, really, to the central figures of American history. What I think the Claremont Institute is committed to is keeping America firmly focused on 1776 and 1787. That means either denying in total or trying to whitewash--I use that term advisedly--the history of White Supremacy.

Now, one might agree that the 1619 vision is, first of all, very bleak. One might even say that it is too unsparing and does not adequately recognize some of the nuances of American history. That being said, it seems to me that the 1619 Project is correct in saying that one cannot understand American history without understanding our basic foundations in a White, or one might even say a Europeanist, sensibility.

That is what is, in part, tearing the country apart. Bill Galston in a recent Wall Street Journal article cited some new data in which an astonishing number of people, especially Republicans, are willing to say basically that if you're not Christian, you're not a real American. I’m sure that a lot of them would also add to that, that if you're not from Europe, in one way or another, then you're not a real American. That exclusivist vision is obviously under full-scale attack, which only feeds the fears of those who view their traditional hegemony as being challenged. We're speaking today in Boston, which is certainly historically a bastion of white supremacy in terms of much of its politics, but yesterday elected Michelle Wu, a young Chinese-American woman, as mayor.

This really does typify, I think, the increasing split in the country between what might be termed cosmopolitan urbanism and a much more parochial notion of American identity. It used to be a term of political discourse to refer to “ruthless cosmopolitans.” That was, I think, code in part for Jews, but also for left internationalists in general.

I think that one way of reading the Claremont Institute is that they are just frightened to death that America is being taken over by ruthless cosmopolitans. The roots that are in question really are a notion of America in the 18th century that was solidly and unequivocally controlled by white male Christian Europeans.

VI: Ryan Williams proudly maintains that "the primary mission of the Claremont Institute is to save Western Civilization." So it seems their idea of Western Civilization is defined as an inherited political philosophy based on European-based Christian beliefs?

Sandy Levinson: I think you're right. You see this more and more in the critique of off-beat but very important intellectuals like Adrian Vermeule at Harvard Law School, who is a relatively recent convert to Catholicism, I would say, probably in the last five years.  He has become a partisan really of Catholic integralism. That is, our real need is to return to the kind of consensus around the Catholic Church that you have, let us say, in the 13th or 14th century.

VI: So the beliefs of Medieval times?

Sandy Levinson: Right. Patrick Deneen, who had a much-discussed book published in 2018, Why Liberalism Failed, spearheaded a thorough growing attack on intellectual liberalism, not merely what we think of politically as liberal values, social security, stuff like that, but much more importantly an attack on the intellectual roots of liberalism in secular enlightenment theory and the need really to reject that and to return to the strict dogma of Catholicism. Deneen teaches at Notre Dame, perhaps not surprisingly.

VI: We can see evidence of this attitude in an opinion piece by Katherine Stewart in The New York Times at the beginning of last year titled The Root of Josh Hawley's Rage. She describes how Josh Hawley has gone back to medieval teachings of the Catholic Church, condemning a 5th century British monk named Pelagius who preached that human beings should have the freedom to choose how they live their lives and that grace comes to those who do good deeds rather than who just believe in the right dogmas. Hawley maintains this was a serious departure from traditional teaching of the Church that led to an irresponsible individualism that caused Western Civilization to go off the rails.

Sandy Levinson: Eric Nelson, who is a truly brilliant political theorist and historian of political theory at Harvard, published a book a couple of years ago called The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God, which is a very, very close analysis of John Rawls, who is, obviously, one of the chief political theorists of intellectual liberalism over the last 50 years. Nelson points out that Rawls, when he arrived at Princeton as an undergraduate, was a very conservative Christian, really, an Augustinian in his views of the world. He ultimately changed. I don't know if he actually left Christianity completely but he certainly changed his views. Eric structures the book in many ways as a debate over the Pelagian heresy.

When Hawley evokes the Pelagian heresy, he is basically questioning free will and independence. Ultimately, this is a very, very important part of Nelson's analysis, that if you really take Pelagian thought fully seriously, then there's no particular need for God to play a central role because you are not the kind of fallen creature that St. Augustine says we are. Salvation can come to those living a good life outside the strictures of the Church.

It's a fascinating book that is not partisan in a sense of expressing a political view, as Josh Hawley does. I think that Hawley is an interesting guy. He's well educated and very smart, and so one ought not to ignore that particular speech and its nostalgia for a very conservative Christian understanding of how to organize the world.

Hawley went to Catholic schools and defines himself as an Evangelical Christian. One of the things we have seen in the last number of years, particularly in the United States, is an alliance among conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants, and for that matter, certain Orthodox Jews. When we were growing up, they would have been bitter enemies of one another, but they are now, very often, allied in their critiques of what they view as the ruthless, godless, cosmopolitan political order that we now live in.

VI: It's not just the Claremont Institute, but it's also groups like the Federalist Society and other right-wing think tanks and the organizations that are coordinating a way of talking, a way of perceiving the country, and the role of government that is then propagated effectively by talk radio, Fox News, and social media. We saw how in the last month of the recent Virginia election for governor the teaching of critical race theory in schools was inserted by the Republican candidate as a core issue and used to hammer the former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe, leading to his defeat. Isn’t this an example conservative determination?

Sandy Levinson: For sure. It certainly did not help that McAuliffe gave them the sound bite of their dreams by saying that parents have no role in setting curriculum. Now, I think that view can be defended, but to put it mildly, it requires genuine argument not just a campaign tactic.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, it requires defending the authority of the existing educational elites. Obviously, we're living at a time and in a culture where the authority of all elites is under question. Whether ironically or not, the origin of much of this questioning would be people of my generation. I grew up in the 1960s where the central mantra was, "Question authority." In my own case one of the most important books for my education was Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which challenged the received wisdom on the meaning of “rationality” in scientific inquiry.

A whole critique, in the broad name of postmodernism, presented a deep questioning of conventional wisdom or established authority, and the need to be wary and seek new truths.

VI: We were all seeking new paradigms.

Sandy Levinson: Exactly. The right has actually been very clever in some of their use of postmodernist sorts of arguments. They argue quite often and quite effectively that it is those of us - and I use that term advisedly since I teach at elite universities - with established power and authority who are desperate to maintain it against the outsiders who are offering criticism.

As I say, I think there are arguments that can be made against that but they don't lend themselves very well to sound bites, simply saying, "I believe in science." If you are a child of Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and many other works in the philosophy of science, then you realize that the history of science is the overthrowing of existing structures of reality. They're replaced  often by quite radically new paradigms. In other words, ,there's nothing necessarily stable about scientific authority.

VI: The Conservative Right has long been involved in defining primary education. Certainly, you know about this from Texas where a conservative state curriculum board sets education guidelines and approves all textbooks. 

In the teaching of biology, many states have laws that require that the biblical version of creation be taught alongside the scientific theory of evolution.

Sandy Levinson: That's exactly right. The way it was portrayed is that creationism was entitled to a certain equal time as a competing theory of origins.

VI: Conservatives, with the backing of fossil fuel energy companies, have led the fight against acceptance of man-made causes of global warming - disputing the mounting evidence of global scientists. Don’t Conservative intellectuals these days have to twist themselves into difficult mental knots to deny scientific warnings that the global community is facing dire threats from climate change?

Sandy Levinson: Their only defensible position is to insert skepticism. Conservatives state that at the very least the public should be exposed to the fact that there is not a consensus on the causes of climate change but in doing so they also support the notion that one ought basically to ignore the fact that scientific professionals seem to line up by, let us say, 95% against 5% rather than 50-50. I think that one of the problems with media or traditional media, in some sense, is a bending over backwards to appear fair.  So that if there is a controversy, they often don't say, "Well, here is a professor with really unusual views within the academy that have been rejected by 95% of his/her colleagues.

Instead, they will sometimes say, "Well, there is a dominant view, but you also want to be aware that there are critics, and so here is the critic." The Wall Street Journal has been especially skilled in doing this, particularly in having  Saturday interviews with academic dissidents who do not represent many people within the academy, but they are often institutionally affiliated and with credible scholarly credentials.

I think it is a real problem for those of us without the real ability to assess most controversies for ourselves. I cannot assess the arguments about global warming. I don't have the training, so ultimately, what I think most of us do is to rely on a mixture of well-presented data and institutional authorities.  It’s important to us that people at Harvard, MIT, and Caltech have a certain view of reality.

That's going to be good enough for me but it's not because I can't understand the arguments that are being made; it's that I do ultimately respect those authority figures. I think that is the really deep conflict that is going on right now - what are the limits of questioning authority? Who gets to say when authorities are subject to questioning by non-authorities?  Is it  proper to give deference when Dr. Fauci says that it must be true? I can sense that tends to be my own view, but it's not that I'm a trained epidemiologist. 

VI: Back in the '60s and '70s, those working in education were looking for new ways to teach kids methods to think for themselves, to move on from pure rote learning. The popular term was to teach "critical thinking” across the curriculum. It's strange that now in 2021 the notion of critical thinking, being able to be informed so that you can question, is under attack across the country by conservative forces which maintain it promotes “white guilt.” 

Sandy Levinson:  I agree with you unequivocally. As you were talking, I found myself thinking of the line from one of Bob Dylan songs Subterranean Homesick Blues. "Don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters."

That was a very, very powerful argument for insight into the culture of that time. I think today the "Don't follow leaders" is much more likely to come from the Right, except of course for Donald Trump, but certainly to question "the mainstream leaders," the people running the elite universities or the elite newspapers, or what remains of mainstream television.

They are the leaders that their followers are being encouraged not to follow, and to trust others. I think that's what culture war is all about. We are in the middle of a huge culture war. Culture wars inevitably involve the creation of alternative institutions, alternative sources of authority.

For example, I'm fascinated by Hillsdale College. For some reason, I'm on their mailing list. Their most recent brochure that I received, along with a request to contribute to enable them to carry out their mission, was a long article by Roger Kimball, the founding editor of The New Criterion, which was a serious, conservative journal founded in the '80s as an antidote to what was thought to be the too liberal or too left tilt of many mainstream journals. Roger Kimball basically argues that January 6th was not an insurrection at all but rather it was part of a dangerous liberal hoax and that has to be fought against.

This, I think, is just an interesting data point because Kimball, to put it mildly, is not one of the uneducated white guys without a college degree, who are providing, in some ways, the political base for Trump. The Right has a cadre of intellectuals with credentials who are creating a counter anti-liberal ideology, and to go back to your original question, one of their tactics is to retreat to very old kinds of hegemonic Christianity or hegemonic Catholicism dogma.

VI: Their mission statement is, "Hillsdale College considers itself a trustee of our Western philosophical and theological inheritance tracing to Athens and Jerusalem, a heritage finding its clearest expression in the American experience of self-government under law."  If January 6th can be seen as some kind of free expression under law, then, that's a very broad interpretation of their mission.

Sandy Levinson: I think that's part of the schizophrenia of American thought among both liberals and conservatives, in what one does with the reality of what I usually now call the secession of the United States from the British empire or more commonly referred to as the American Revolution.

I'm teaching a course this term at Harvard Law School on Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. One of the very first readings is a speech that Lincoln gave in 1838, the most analyzed speech in history by a then-unknown 29-year-old. It is a hymn to the importance of the rule of law. He says that we should teach devotion to law and respect for law as a political religion. This is what constitutes us as Americans.

The very same speech valorizes the heroes of the revolution who engaged in the violent overthrow of the existing British government in North America and did so on the grounds that they were defending the real British constitution or the real notion of government by the people that had become fatally weakened by British corruption. I think that we have always had within American culture heroes on both the Right and the Left who engage in civil disobedience.

It was William Lloyd Garrison who burned the Constitution and described it as the covenant with death and an agreement with hell and initially called for secession - there could be no Union with slaveholders. Frederick Douglas wrote a very eloquent article in which he defended the killing of the US Marshals who were trying to return fugitive slaves to the South.

One simply can't understand American history as if we always have a shared understanding of what the rule of law means, especially with regard to the validity of people engaging in at least civil disobedience and at most armed violence in order to validate the rule of law against those people in power who the argument would go have betrayed the genuine meaning of the American heritage.

Louis Hartz many years ago argued that the American Civil War was a war between two sides, each of whom had a plausible view of what the US Constitution meant. What we would like to think is that Lincoln is the unequivocal hero and Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were unequivocal traitors betraying the US Constitution, but it really is more complicated than that.

I think that is one of the things that makes American history so interesting to an academic or to a theorist, but also so completely complicated when it becomes translated into ordinary politics and ordinary political discourse. Almost nobody has an incentive to offer a really nuanced speech that recognizes how complicated things can be.

VI: This brings us back to the topic of Emma Green’s article that Conservatives while dreading it are also preparing for a  civil war. They maintain the nation is critically divided due to the reality that at least fifty percent of the people living in the United States are not real Americans because they do not hold the values that Conservatives consider essential.

Ryan Williams of the Claremont Institute states, "Maybe it'd be better if just the Red states be Red states and Blue states be Blue states...Let's bring in more federalism, less central government, and that'll be the way forward." Isn’t this what we now have - a de-facto political separation with Red states passing laws on voting rights, abortion, public health, and education that no Blue state would ever accept?

Sandy Levinson: That's right. When I teach federalism in my constitutional law courses, what I always do is to say that federalism is a real test of what we mean by diversity and what lines we're willing to draw with regard to how diverse we can be as an American public and still say that there's a meaningful thing called an American public, rather than a Mississippi public or Massachusetts public, et cetera.

When I was born, which was 1941, the Bill of Rights had only barely been applied to the states so that the practical meaning of liberty or freedom, of your rights as a criminal defendant, or whether you prayed in school - which I did in North Carolina - or not, really depended on where you lived.

Then in the 1950s and '60s, the Bill of Rights was nationalized, and federalism was brought under attack. William Riker, who was a leading political scientist of the time said “Well, if you were racist, you will like federalism. Then the converse also seemed to be true that if you were a strong proponent of federalism, you were probably a racist.”

The United States became much more of what the critics of the 1787 Constitution feared would be the case, that is a consolidated republic. I think that one of the things that is being tested right now is whether we will remain a consolidated republic or drift back not necessarily to the Articles of Confederation, but to the kind of federalism that we had a hundred years ago which was very, very weak. It would've been unexceptional in1920 for states to have very different policies on what could be said, on freedom of speech, as well as very different policies on abortion.

In 1920, nobody would have regarded it as even thinkable that such issues would become constitutionalized and decided upon by courts. The paradox, of course, in a case argued in front of the Supreme Court recently, is that it's the right-wing that wants to nationalize policies on religious accommodations at the same time that it wants to engage in radical, decentralization on matters of same-sex marriage.

One of the interesting things incidentally about abortion is that I suspect there are more and more people on the so-called pro-life side who want to nationalize that on their side. In the 1990s, somebody like Scalia was the proponent of the so-called federal solution, similar to slavery, incidentally, that states could be slave, or they could be free. The US Constitution didn't dictate a single solution. Even Lincoln accepted that. What Scalia railed against was the idea that the constitution required a single national solution. I think that most people today probably believe that there ought to be a single national solution.

If you're a political liberal, you think that reproductive rights should be protected everywhere in the country. I think increasingly that if you're a conservative anti-abortionist, you believe that all abortion is murder and that no state should allow the taking of an innocent fetus's life. I would not be very surprised, if political liberals really do capture working control of the presidency and Congress, that one of the things that would be on their agenda is passing a national reproductive rights act. By the same token, if conservative Republicans end up taking the presidency and Congress in 2024, then I think you will see efforts for a national law prohibiting abortions.

VI: Not a case like Roe v Wade decided by the Supreme Court, but a law passed by Congress?

Sandy Levinson: Right. I don't exactly know how that necessarily fits with the Claremont Institute, that sort of single national policy. The same thing would be true of guns if you think of  the return to the Articles or the return even to American federalism circa the early 20th century that allows each state to have some gun policy, each state to have its policy on sex, marriage, gambling, et cetera.

VI: The ambition of the Claremont Institute, according to Ryan Williams, is to have Conservatives control  all three branches of the government - executive, legislative, and the courts - for a couple of generations so that they can get this country back on track.

Sandy Levinson: That is what they would love to do, but that's also what liberal institutions would love to do. The question politically from day one has always been whether a country so radically diverse and fragmented as the United States can endure - that's been a constant, I think from the beginning. It's simply much, much more apparent today in part because politics have become so much more inclusive today - for example, with Michelle Wu being elected mayor of Boston - than would have been conceivable 50 years ago in Boston--when Boston was still firmly in the control of White Irish and Italians. Probably all of them Catholic.

Michelle Wu is a new day, but how do you put together a political system that is so diverse in terms of the different sets of values, different religions, different ethnicities, into a policy that can in fact function? I'm very dubious at times that we can do this and, going back to some earlier conversations we've had, I think the constitution itself is a detriment, rather than a help to any long-term solution.

A number of my friends point out that the Constitution would work just fine if empirically, we weren't so divided. What we are talking about is the reality of deep divisions of all kinds. One of which, at least, is very well illustrated by the Claremont Institute.

VI: I think we'll have to wait to have another conversation in the fall of 2022 after the congressional election to see how things go. As far as elections are concerned, one of the last questions Emma Green put to Ryan Williams was "Republicans have lost the popular vote in nearly every presidential election in the last three decades. Do you worry about a project of minority rule - trying to assert your vision upon a country where many, many people do not agree with even your basic premises about what the American republic should look like?”

Ryan William's response was, "I reject the premise that just because the popular vote isn't won, you don't possess a constitutional majority. We have an Electoral College system for a reason. Democracy, for the Founders, was a means to the end of the protection of rights. They set up a republic, not a democracy. The rule of pure numbers was never the touchstone of justice for the Founders." I think that the big question resonating today is what do we really mean by democracy in America?

Sandy Levinson: I think that's absolutely right. I have to say I think that the quality of public conversation across the political board is just dismal. As you know because I'm sure we talked about it before, my favorite presidential election is 1912 because in Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eugene V. Debs, you had really serious visionaries of sorts and constitutional reformers. In William Howard Taft, you have an extraordinary able defender of the existing constitutional order.

During that decade, we had four constitutional amendments, and much more to the point, mainstream people were talking about the need for constitutional reform. Whereas I am more and more disappointed with the fact that Barack Obama, who was president of the Harvard Law Review, and who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago law school, never once gave a truly incisive speech on the US Constitution or for that matter, on the meaning of democracy. Ironically enough, in one sense, his most interesting speech was when Democrats were slaughtered in the 2010 midterms.

What Obama said was that politics is a matter of compromise. Then he said we wouldn't have had a constitution if there had not been a willingness to compromise. Part of the compromise was that people like Barack Obama weren't viewed really as part of America.  That was especially true with regard to his wife, because Michelle is a descendant of slaves in a way that Barack is not. What I thought was interesting about that speech was that it seemed to fit the kind of compromise the Founders accepted that to construct a new country it was necessary climb in bed with slave owners.

You can obviously process that back to the 1619 project, in which I think they would say, "Well, yes, the price of union was slavery and white supremacy." Obama should not have, in effect, apologized for that, or said "Well, that's a feature rather than a truly disastrous bug of the American past, and that we really do have to have a much more serious discussion of what we mean by Democracy.” For all sorts of reasons, I don't think that we have political leaders who are either particularly capable of or more to the point, really interested, in taking the political risk of being in serious discussions of the meaning of democracy in the 21st Century.

VI: Sandy, as always, thanks very much for your insights. To be continued, I am sure.

Sandy Levinson holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School and is also a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. He is an American legal scholar, best known for his writings on constitutional law. Professor Levinson is notable for his criticism of the United States Constitution as well as excessive presidential power and has been widely quoted on such topics as the Second Amendment, nominations to the Supreme Court, and other legal issues. He has called for a Second Constitutional Convention of the United States.