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1. Wish me luck folks, I'm going in. (I mean, I study the founding era and I teach a course on the history of American conservatism, it would be malpractice for me *not* to listen to this.)
podcastone.com/episode/Senato…
podcastone.com/episode/Senato…
2. Ok, had to take a break after 5 minutes because I can feel my brain losing synapses in real time. TIL, a) Mike Lee (R-UT) ranks Calvin Coolidge as one of America's greatest presidents and b) George III believed in the divine right of kings.
3. Mike Lee, self-appointed expert on the history of the founding era, appears to have forgotten about the English Civil War (1641-1660), the Glorious Revolution (1688), and this minor thinker named John Locke.
4. But, you know, what are basic textbook facts about Anglo-American political history amongst ideological soulmates who have a radically partisan and ahistorical take on the Constitution to promote?
5. Some takeaways from the next 13 minutes. a) Thomas Jefferson is really the key figure we need to study if we want to understand how slavery ended. Lee says TJ is basically responsible for the language of the 14th Amendment (written 40+ yrs after TJ died).
6. Also, Lee has great admiration for the passage in the D of I (that was eventually excised) where TJ blamed George III for slavery. This is just soooooo on the GOP brand... nypl.org/blog/2012/07/0…
7. TJ, as the owner of hundreds of people who he never freed, basically says "Dangit King George, why did you make me own all of these slaves! You are just the *worst* tyrant imaginable." Lee takes this to be TJ saying something noble, rather than TJ shirking responsibility.
8. In sum, what we get here is a history of how a slaveholding nation founded in 1776/87 became a nation that outlawed slavery in 1865 in which white slaveholders like TJ are the heroes of that story. So far Lee has not mentioned a single historical figure who's not a white male.
9. His take on Paine (who I know a few things about) is not egregiously inaccurate, but it is spun interestingly. Lee's Paine is someone who woke Americans up from their stupor with his simple but powerful message that roused "the common man" to fight for liberty. Sounds like...?
10. But what stands out the most here is the underlying theme that somehow the "real" Constitution got lost "about 80 years ago," i.e. during the New Deal. Lee is trying to use the founders (like Paine) to delegitimize the modern administrative state created in the 20th century.
11. Here's an earlier thread where I talk about this once fringe idea that the constitution went into exile in 1937.
12. FDR famously said that his opponents wanted to adhere to an interpretation of the Constitution that was appropriate for an age of horse and buggy, but which made no sense in a modern era marked by industrial and technological complexity the founders could have never imagined.
13. Mike Lee is one of the more thoughtful and knowledgeable GOP legislators out there today, and even he embraces this simplistic "horse and buggy" understanding of what "the real Constitution" should mean today.
14. But let's grant Lee's premise that we should follow what the founders (like Paine, who he claims to love) had to say. In 1792, Paine wrote to espouse progressive taxation, a redistributive estate tax, and something resembling UBI.
15. To return to Silent Cal. It's really revealing that Mike Lee loves Cal so much--the guy who signed the racist 1924 immigration restriction bill and who built the unregulated economy that crashed a few months after he left office. Here's what real historians think. 
16. In sum, historians for the past 20 years have ranked Cal in the bottom half of Presidents...but Mike Lee is bravely doing his bit to put this underappreciated genius on the Mt. Rushmore of our national memory. (FWIW, Reagan also really admired Coolidge.)
17. It wouldn't be a Federalist interview w/o a snarky swipe at "the PC crowd." The host (hubby of Meghan McCain, who is probably the reason the Twitter infamous "Denise" was invited to their wedding) chuckles that he will be going to "an anti-racist book fair" this weekend.
18. "What's so smirk-worthy about anti-racism," we might ask...but moving on. What gets the host and Mike Lee's dander up is the argument that "the Enlightenment and Christianity" caused racism and slavery. [Note: almost no historians really make such a stark argument.]
19. What I think they have in mind is the more subtle point succinctly stated here by @jbouie, that the Enlightenment was a pivotal moment in the history of racial thinking, when "scientific racism" first emerged. Few historians would dispute that. slate.com/news-and-polit…
@jbouie 20. But both the host and Mike Lee are committed to a conservative narrative in which the Enlightenment and Christianity are the essential pillars of what makes America great. Thus critical takes on either of those traditions must be PC, anti-American garbage.
@jbouie 21. Hitting pause on this thread to listen to the rest of the conversation. Crafting historical narratives to serve contemporary political purposes is what all politicians and pundits do. That's fair enough. But some try to have more fidelity to the scholarship than others.
@jbouie 22. Just remembered that Lee's book is about the fight against tyranny from George III to "the Deep State." Still working thru the irony that "deep state" is a relatively new term deployed mostly by right wing authoritarians to insulate themselves from accountability.
@jbouie 23. Yeah, I think I can say with confidence that Tom Paine would not be on board with the sorts of leaders who write books complaining about "the deep state." ips-dc.org/what-trump-mea…
@jbouie 24. Ok, I just listened to the segment on the Mueller report. There's spin, and then there's unmitigated and indefensible bullsh*t. Lee's take on the Mueller report is definitely the latter.
@jbouie 25. Lee concludes from the 400+ Mueller report (and the multitude of indictments and convictions it produced) that the president had done some embarrassing things, but that there's really nothing of serious concern there.
@jbouie 26. Being open to receiving oppo on your opponents stolen by a hostile foreign government? No biggie. Telling multiple underlings to do a Saturday night massacre but not having the attention span to follow through when they quietly demure? Meh.
@jbouie 27. The discussion of Mueller is nested, interestingly, in a broader conversation about the theory of the unitary executive, a theory Lee likes. Basically, let's give the executive even more power and make them less accountable to other branches.
@jbouie 28. I wouldn't find Lee's embrace so galling if he hadn't already outed himself as a fan of Paine. Paine helped write the PA constitution of 1776 (and was proud of it until the day he died). avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/p…
29. That PA constitution literally had a 12-person executive because Paine and his compatriots so hated the idea of a unitary executive.
30. Paine would have had a good 18th century term to describe Lee's shamelessly partisan defense of Trump's abuses of power and unethical behavior. It's what a "toady" would do.
31. But wait, it gets worse. The conclusion Lee draws from the Mueller report--and wait for it because I'm sure you've not heard this anywhere else--is that the investigators were the real criminals here and need to be investigated. Smash the deep state conspirators! Lock 'em up!
32. The Mueller conversation is also nested in a brief discussion of the Church Committee from the 1970s and the need to balance the privacy of citizens with the imperatives of national security. All to the good. brookings.edu/blog/brookings…
33. But Lee's discussion of this is all premised on the idea that the Trump campaign was somehow the innocent victim of an illegitimate investigation. He mostly wants to protect his own unethical president and his criminal cronies from gov't oversight.
34. BTW, at no time during this interview did anyone bring up the Russian attempts to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. Perhaps that's just too embarrassing to discuss? Or maybe they think it's totally cool and totally legal? Hard to say.
35. So yeah, here we have a conversation between two super-patriots who believe in law and order who appear totally unfazed by the behavior detailed in the Mueller Report. I mean, who wouldn't engage in behavior like that, right? What's the big deal?
36. You know who'd think it was a big deal? This guy. And I suspect if he could come back to life he would ask Mike Lee to get his name out of his mouth.
37. This entire conversation just left me feeling despondent about American politics. Mike Lee is one of the more reasonable Republican politicians out there today, and he's just a shameless shill for what he must know is an indefensibly unethical President.
38. Right around minute 49 we learn that the governing philosophy of Europe's leading democracies and the ideals endorsed by generations of millions of American progressives like FDR is "conceived in hell by the devil himself." Good lord.
39. I'm left with the impression that one of the nation's two political party has essentially decided to unmoor itself from science, history, and the process of governing and administering a complex modern society.
40. They've created a media and thinktank infrastructure that enables them to live in a comfortable bubble of their own making and which furthers the economic interests of a tiny fraction of wealthy people who fund these institutions.
41. To be sure ordinary voters stay with them they deploy cynical scare tactics (they're gonna ban your churches, install Satanist socialism, make you go gay or switch genders, leave you defenseless to be murdered by 'those people'). It's just all so stupid.
42. There's a reason why virtually every single conservative intellectual with a shred of integrity (or who is not just an outright fascist) has become forcefully critical of Trump's GOP. It's really almost indefensible on any legitimate historical or philosophical grounds.
43. Thus, all the GOP has left is "bashing the Satanic libs" and white identity politics. It's what their base wants, so it's what they're giving them. Meanwhile, over on the left, there are 357 podcasts dissecting the minute details of climate or health care policy.
44. We now live in a political society where one party is interested in governing, and one party is interested in "owning the libs" and protecting the criminal their base chose to be their Presidential nominee who they all hate.
45. Thanks for coming to the most depressing Ted talk ever. I need a beer.
Coda: Please don't snitch tag in either the host of the podcast or the Senator from Utah. I've heard plenty of what they have to say, and I have little interest in being fed to the MAGA lions by them. I'd rather spend my time reading than blocking the troll army.
Producing this thread reminded me that I actually e-mailed the host of this show back in June 2017. To paraphrase Dylan, I was so much older and dumber then, I'm younger and smarter than that now. medium.com/@sethcotlar/th…
Returning for a quick update. The comments about the "anti-racist book festival" appear around minute 10 of the podcast. The section starts off deadpan, but soon shift into incredulity. Here is a flyer from the event. A Yale prof & a Johns Hopkins prof, both brilliant historians.
Imagine encouraging your politically-inclined listeners to be instinctively suspicious of (if not hostile to) an event that features the author of the best biography of F. Douglass to date and the author of the definitive study of the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship?
And imagine having just spoken with fake historian Mike Lee about the dumb idea that Jefferson is a key originator of the 14th Amendment, and not noting that the event you're attending tomorrow will feature an actual expert on the topic from whom you might learn something?
