David Azerrad Interview
On the American Founding and freeing our minds
Eds. note: This was originally recorded as an audio conversation, but Brian’s file was corrupted. What follows is a transcript of David’s remarks combined with the questions that I wrote up going into the interview. What you won’t be able to get from the transcript is that I made David laugh two or three times, of which I’m quite proud.
A number of his wonderful essays and discussions are linked to in the questions below; if you scroll to the bottom, you will find additional links to talks, essays, and interviews of David that I’ve learned important things from.
Brian: Today I am joined by Hillsdale DC campus professor of politics David Azerrad! He recently wrote an outstanding essay called “Race and the Conservative Conscience” in Arthur Milikh’s new volume Up From Conservatism. David is a rare breed of commentator in that he offers clear insights into the present moment that flow out of a study of the history of political philosophy; this is rare, because, on one hand, many prescient commentators on the present moment aren't aware of the fundamental questions of political life that political philosophy unearths, and on the other, many scholars of political philosophy seem strangely unable to bring their awareness of these problems to bear on the present moment.
David, you recently had a set of conversations with Tom West on the American Founding and they were outstanding. You both brought to light a number of features in the founding that strike us today as illiberal. Could you tell us about some of those features?
David: I'm glad that you chose your words carefully: they strike us as illiberal, i.e., they are not necessarily illiberal. To settle the question, we first need clarity on what liberalism is. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that it’s both an anthropology and a teaching on the role of government and its legitimate powers.
So let’s look at the anthropology first. Liberalism is the state of nature teaching. It's giving ontological priority to the individual and asserting his rights claims before claims of duties. It's disentangling the individual from the authoritative communities into which he is born, to which he belongs, and to which he is subordinated in more traditional accounts. The individual comes before the father, the king, and the priest. That is why he is free to emigrate or convert.
Today we think that once you accept this anthropology, it means, first, that life becomes a “choose your own adventure” and that you should pretty much be free to do whatever the hell you please—especially on matters related to sex (and to a lesser extent, drugs)—so long as you don’t directly harm others (with the left and the right disagreeing on what counts as “harm”). We also think this anthropology means that the government has a duty to subsidize and honor the ways in which you choose to express your authentic inner self. So for example, you can choose to become a woman, and the government should pay for your sex changes and silence those who criticize you. After all, are you truly free to become the woman you want to be if you can’t afford the surgery and if society will stigmatize you?
If you read Locke or if you study the founding, they clearly espouse the liberal anthropology. If you look at the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, the individual with his rights is front and center. But then they don’t draw from that a political teaching that is either libertarian—consenting individuals can do whatever the hell they please—or progressive—the individual has a right to have his lifestyle subsidized and honored. Instead, both Locke and the Founders thought that the policies necessary to secure the rights of the individual would require considerable restrictions on what we today would call the libertarian and progressive conceptions of liberty, which is why they strike us as illiberal.
For example, take the founders and the way that they thought about the family. Generally speaking, they had a legal arrangement called coverture where married women were largely legally subsumed under their husbands. They didn’t completely cease to exist as an individual with rights—obviously a husband couldn’t murder his wife—but by and large married women did not possess the same civil rights as men. Women, for example, did not vote. Now, if you’ve read West’s Vindicating the Founders, you will know that there were exceptions: women voted in New Jersey for a 10-year period shortly after the founding. I believe it’s a first in human history. But, otherwise, they did not and no one at the time seemed to think this was incompatible with equal natural rights (unlike say, slavery, which everyone condemned). The Founders believed in individual natural rights but were not egalitarians on issues of gender.
Or look at free speech. At the time of the Founding, we had laws on the books in most states banning blasphemy. And this was not viewed as being incompatible with the right to free speech. Now, blasphemy was defined rather narrowly as the malicious slandering of religion so that, for example, Thomas Paine's Age of Reason wouldn't be covered under blasphemy. You were allowed to criticize the presuppositions of religion and the commitment to science. At the end of the day, people did have wide latitude to inquire into subjects that maybe religion wouldn't want you to examine. That said, the Founders didn't seem to think it was incompatible with natural rights and individual freedom to ban the malicious slandering of religion.
I'll give you one last example, perhaps the one that most shocks people today. We had immigration and naturalization laws passed by Congress in 1790, 1792, and then 1795 which restricted citizenship to free white persons of good character. They used race. Of course, this was not a fundamental principle of government. It's not in the Constitution. It was a law passed by Congress, but they were restricting citizenship basically to people of European descent and again, no one at the time thought that this was illiberal or incompatible with the principles of the Founding.
Brian: Those examples are really helpful. So you have shown that there is more latitude within liberal principles to create laws that are more serious / traditional and so on; so why is it that America has a "genetic predisposition" toward decadence?--though as you have said, it is not fated
David: Yeah, that's the inevitable question and you have many schools of thought but there are two prominent ones. There is the Patrick Deneen one, which is really not that original since you find a version of his argument in Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah, and to some extent in Strauss's Natural Right and History in his account of the three waves of modernity. The argument is that the principles of liberalism necessarily and inexorably point to decadence (as well as relativism, nihilism, and egalitarianism). In other words, it’s a slippery slope from liberalism to the mess we’re in today.
Then you have the other position on the right which I'll flippantly call the “Immaculate Founding” (with the obvious caveat that everyone recognizes that slavery was a problem). Many conservatives almost seem to say that the Founders’ regime is perfect. Why then is America in such a mess today? They point the finger at foreigners: it’s the fault of the Germans whose progressive and leftists ideas corrupted the country.
But this of course merely begs the question: why did progressive principles catch on so readily? Would progressive ideals catch on in Sparta? Of course not. So clearly there's something in the soil that is receptive. I’m ultimately more of a Tocquevillian where I think one can admire America and still notice that it has some bad tendencies. I'm just not comfortable with people who argue that there are absolute necessities. There's just too much contingency in the realm of politics. It’s one thing to notice tendencies and predispositions, quite another to posit iron laws.
There are two problematic tendencies that I notice in the Founders’ regime that one should guard against. A modern republic is supposed to produce tremendous prosperity. It is supposed to make life more comfortable, on the one hand, through the embrace of Baconian science aimed at the relief of man's estate, and on the other, through commerce or what we call capitalism (this is the Lockean dimension). This regime leads to innovation and economic growth, but it also rechannels the thumotic impulses of young men away from conquests of glory towards what we today would call entrepreneurship, towards making money. As Locke says, we're going to reward the industrious and rational, not the covetous and quarrelsome. So, by design the regime is going to produce peace and prosperity. The tradition of political philosophy has long recognized, and indeed common sense will confirm, that human beings grow soft under periods of prolonged peace and prosperity. Is it a coincidence that the sixties happened in the sixties, i.e., to the first generation in American history to grow up amidst so much plenty and with no war, and when the war came, it was in faraway Vietnam and many of the young did not want to fight?
I don't think Locke or the Founders sufficiently thought through this problem of how to guard against the perils of peace and prosperity. Now in their defense you could say they had other fish to fry. The Founders had to win the war of independence and build this regime. I don't think one should demand that they have answers to everything but in the case of Locke who's a philosopher and not a statesman, I think it is a blind spot in his thinking that he hasn't properly thought this through in a way that, say, Machiavelli has. Machiavelli in the Discourses talks about the importance of a “return to beginnings”: that every 10 years at most, the prince should execute some prominent citizen in order to scare the bejesus out of the people, i.e., to remind them of the harshness of political beginnings. He thought this would help guard against corruption and that it was healthy for the political community.
The other issue I see—and Tocqueville is the one who brings this out so beautifully—is that in a regime anchored in the idea that all men are created equal, the more equal we are, the more equal we want to be, and the more inequalities weigh on our conscience. Many of these egalitarian demands will inevitably go well beyond the more limited understanding of equality espoused at the time of the Founding. Rawls, for example, wants to control for the accidents of birth in order to equalize life chances. Many on the Right will say, well that is not what the Founders meant by equality. And they are right. But Tocqueville would respond, I think, that the people will not be bound by their more limited understanding of equality. At the end of the day, the people vote and they're going to demand more and more equality.
You really see it with the racial issue in America where every advance in eliminating a form of discrimination on the basis of race gives rise to new demands for more equality. There's an illuminating passage in Stokely Carmichael, the founder of black power, in which he speaks of the demand for psychological equality between blacks and whites. Obviously that is not what Locke or the Founders meant by equality. But we live in a democracy, and so we are engaged in this mad quest to redistribute honor and property to try to eliminate any lingering feelings of superiority or inferiority in either of the races. This is where I break with the Deneen types in that I think the problem is maybe less in liberalism than in democracy, meaning more on the democratic side of liberal democracy than in the liberal side of liberal democracy.
I think it would do the Right and defenders of liberal democracy much good to take Rousseau more seriously. I really don't care for those who don’t bother to study him, and instead just lazily dismiss him as the godfather of Marxism, the French Revolution, and all the modern developments we don’t like. There are, of course some real problems in Rousseau's political philosophy and I am not a Rousseauean, but he was right in some of his criticisms of the first wave of modernity or what we call liberal democracy. For example, he points out how the spirit of commerce erodes civic virtues or how liberalism doesn't give a compelling account of love.
The online right has rediscovered Nietzsche and tends to quote him a lot. I think it would do people much good to read Rousseau who, although undeniably a radical in certain ways, is ultimately much more sensible than Nietzsche. One need not follow his prescriptions to learn from his criticism.
Brian: While our decadence is not fated, it is now manifestly here. Could you outline some of the major problems inherent in our contemporary situation? I.e, in Jonah Goldberg's belated exchange with you that you recently replied to at the American Mind, you had to reiterate for the umpteenth time, "what time it is." The phrase is almost turning into a meme, but even if some mainstream conservatives want to avoid looking at the clock...what time is it?
David: Yeah, you're right that the line is getting overused but it is a great one. To the best of my knowledge, it was coined by my friend Dave Reaboi and when I was in Hungary last year the Hungarians told me that it's a Hungarian turn of phrase. Dave is Hungarian and speaks Hungarian so this would make sense.
Let's start by rejecting two extreme accounts of the state of the regime today. The one is the kind of mindless boomer con optimism: “we just need to elect another version of Reagan, cut some taxes and maybe balance the budget, figure out a way to abolish the department of education…”. America's going to go on forever. We have problems but we've always had problems and this kind of refusal to contemplate the possibility that the regime could collapse or could really transform in a bad way and become much more illiberal and oligarchic and gynecocratic than it is already today.
But then I think it is a problem to conclude that it's midnight or to say it's completely over, America's an illegitimate tyranny, there is no hope, we should move to Hungary.
I'm of the view that the regime is in bad shape. I do not think that the kind of complete recovery or rebirth that the Right longs for is possible (i.e., we can’t undo all the parts of the 20th century we don’t like). In fact, I have a very hard time seeing how we could enact transformational legislation at the national level, at least, within the confines of normal politics. You know, the kind of laws that the Left passed in the 1960s that completely transformed the political landscape: the 64 civil rights act and the 65 immigration act which are, in my estimation, the two most revolutionary laws in American history.
That said, I'm unwilling to preemptively capitulate on the grounds that there is still a large base of patriotic Americans who despise many aspects of the regime. Trump got, according to the official numbers, 74,000,000 votes in 2020 and this is after 5 years of being demonized daily by the press and by every prominent American except for Kanye West. He was just hammered constantly and he still got 74,000,000 people to vote for him.
You know this mediocre song “Rich Men North of Richmond” has just exploded. Why? I mean, it ain't led Zeppelin. I just think it shows that there is so much appetite in the people for those who stand up on their behalf and defy the pieties of the regime and attack the ruling class. So the spirit of the American people is not dead.
That said, one also shouldn't romanticize the vitality of the American people. Not everyone who voted for Trump is the equivalent of a minuteman. The people are in bad shape. The two statistics that most crush my spirit are: We are the most obese developed nation in the world by far and we are the largest consumers and producers of pornography in the world by far. This means that we have lost control over the two strongest appetites in man: sex and food. And then you have got to ask yourself, to what extent can one still speak of a civilization when you can't control these urges? So, you look at the people who love America the most and there is a lot of brokenness there. This was what Charles Murray revealed though his statistical constructs in Coming Apart. The book has its limitations, but it does reveal the extent to which marriage, law obedience, work, church attendance, and one could even add fertility, are going downhill among the lower classes (Murray is, of course, silent on the health of middle class, which is one reason his findings should be taken with a grain of salt).
I have some cautious hope that if we could just get leaders on the Right who could tap into this sentiment, channel it, radicalize it in the best sense of the term—we could do something. The problem is that the demand for uncucked leaders has outstripped the supply now for decades and you can still count on the fingers of maybe one or two hands how many effective leaders there are—not just people who mouth off against the media a la Kari Lake, but people who are actually competent, who get it, and who can do something about it. But once you take power and you try to do something they just hammer you with the media, then they gum up anything you're trying to do and slow it down in the bureaucracy and then they have lawfare. They just unleash lawsuits on everything you're trying to do and the Right hasn't figured out a way to neutralize the Left and the regime's advantage when it comes to the media, the bureaucracy, and Left wing lawfare.
Now are these problems solvable? Maybe. Do we have a solution for them right now? No, we don't. I guess I would say that maybe the last thing that prevents me from swallowing the absolute black complete black pill is, we've tried so little on the Right and also the regime I think is more fragile than we realize. I don't think it's about to collapse tomorrow, but the regime is fragile and that should give us some hope.
So, to return to your question, the hour is late. I would say that by the standards of 1776, you could make a solid case that our grievances dwarf theirs. But I do not think we have exhausted the alternatives and therefore, armed insurrection is not yet justified. And it would definitely be a mistake to despair and preemptively capitulate.
Brian: As you point out in your essay in Up From Conservatism, it seems that many "conservatives bought into the reigning moral framework of the Left." How do we "free our minds once and for all from the fear of being called racists"? This is obviously a practical question of great import, but it is also a permanent or fundamental question related to self-knowledge: how do we free our minds from these false opinions of our cave?
David: That's a very good question. There is such a massive structural disadvantage for the Right: the Left, by definition, occupies the moral high ground on issues of racism, sexism, and homophobia which are the central pieties of the regime. The Right is left with the pathetic cries of “Democrats are the real racists,” to which I say: as if we get to decide who the real racists are! No, the media does and it’s always going to be us, not them.
So how do you change that? It's hard enough for the Right genuinely to not accept the pieties of the Left as authoritative. So many conservatives sincerely buys into this moral framework of racism as defined by the Left, meaning not genocidal national socialism or Calhounite “slavery's a positive good.” I mean speaking indelicately about race. I mean noticing what you're not supposed to notice. I mean thinking that the races are not going to end up equally represented in all realms of life, that it’s not just discrimination that accounts for disparities.
One of the things I ask people in my essay is: would you rather your daughter marry a racist or a pornographer, or a meth dealer? I just don't see if you're any kind of a conservative, how you could pick someone who speaks indelicately about race over someone who's involved in that vile industry of pornography? That should be more disgusting, that should be more disqualifying in public life.
So, the first thing is just to liberate one's own mind from the pieties of the Left. How do you do that? I think you do that just by realizing that slavery was a long time ago and it ain’t going to happen again. The Holocaust is not going to happen again. The head of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, wrote a book called It Could Happen Here. Not it could happen again, but it could happen here! You have got to be kidding me. I’m supposed to believe that America is going to start rounding up Jews and minorities and ship them off to concentration camps. What a ludicrous proposition. So, I think you realize that, real, malicious, genocidal white racism is dead and it is not the greatest threat confronting the country, therefore there is no need to be on constant high alert against it. It obviously doesn’t mean embracing malicious racism. It just means not making whatever gets called racism today (which is, in most case, not racist) the one unforgivable sin.
By contrast, we should have less tolerance for people who are bad on the real threats confronting the country, like out of control third world immigration, radical feminism, wokeness more generally, and the madness of the civil rights regime that is overseeing and encroaching on every last realm of life. We should draw a stronger line there than someone who said something dumb at a frat party twenty years ago.
But as things stand right now, you get crucified if you say something that is not of course genuinely racist—i.e., maliciously vile—but something that the Left calls racist. You can lose your job. You can lose your friends. People will come after you. And it's on the internet for the rest of your life that you've been called a racist. We just don't have the support infrastructure on the Right to either resist cancellations or take care of people who've been unfairly cancelled and so it kind of presupposes a degree of financial autonomy and moral thickness of skin, that most people just don't have to withstand these accusations. It's not pleasant to be called a racist, especially not on the internet because the internet doesn't forgive, and the Right needs to find a way to say we're not going to do this anymore and if someone gets cancelled we take care of them in the way that the Left does. Their people are always employed.
I don't think I've properly answered your question because I don't have a full answer. Ultimately, victory to me would mean: their pieties are no longer authoritative, ours are. That people get canceled in America because they violate our pieties; because they sell out the country to China, because they betray their family in a shameful way. You will always have something like cancellation. The only question is: what are the pieties? To use platonic language, we're always going to live in a cave. The only question is what are the images on the wall right now? It's their images. I would like to find a way to replace them with ours. But I think the task is enormously difficult. But the prerequisite at the very least, is freeing our own minds to have a Right that offers a genuine alternative to the Left or to use the phrase from Phyllis Schlafly's book title, A Choice not an Echo.
Brian: Speaking of fundamental questions, do you think that Leo Strauss' thought can contribute anything to the burgeoning New Right? Is he indispensable for the New Right or should he be peripheral?
David: I owe so much of my intellectual life to him. Someone once put it to me this way: Strauss allowed people like us to see the genius in these great books—to allow us to gain access to their hidden recesses, which, had we been left to our own devices, we would not, in all likelihood, have succeeded in penetrating. And for that we should forever be grateful because he's given us this wonderful gift.
So, should the new Right be reading Strauss? I’d say yes, and for two reasons. One is to be reminded that there's more to life than politics, namely there's philosophy and that it's higher. At the end of the day, Strauss's ultimate allegiance was to socratic skepticism, to the pursuit of wisdom.
Strauss, however, was not indifferent to politics and that is the other reason to read him. He was a friend of liberal democracy without being a flatterer of it. So, to put it in terms that might speak to the New Right (and even more so to the Alt-Right), one could support democracy, without however being blind to its limitations and shortcomings. You can support democracy while eschewing Fukuyama’s mindless optimism: this is the perfect regime, it can't be improved upon and the whole world will adopt it. Strauss is at the end of the day in the camp of liberal democracy but one sees from his writings that he's not a mindless apologist of it. He sees its problems. Ultimately, though he's not a political thinker in the way that the new Right and the online Right are political.
Links to other work by David that are not mentioned above:
Stop Worshiping Your Enemy’s Idols (interview with Alex Kaschuta)
Locke is not a Libertarian (lecture)
American Conservatism is Fiddling While Rome Burns (essay)
The Social Justice Endgame (essay)
He had a courageous talk at St. Vincent’s College on “black privilege” that has now been taken off of youtube because of progressive pressures on that college. David’s suggestion that George Washington Carver was not a groundbreaking Faustian scientist was apparently not well received by some.