00:00:21.500And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.
00:00:25.120So Moira, what are we talking about today?
00:00:26.980Today, we have a really wonderful guest, a thoughtful, charismatic guy who I loved talking
00:00:35.160to, Jeff Dudas, who is a historian at the University of Connecticut, and he has a book
00:00:42.100raised right on the conservative movement and fatherhood and the concept of the paternal.
00:00:49.220And I like to think of this as our episode on the conservative movement's daddy issues.
00:00:54.120Yeah, I feel like that's kind of definitely where we ended up, right?
00:00:56.980It was about, the book is very broad, but at its core, it is a psychobiography of three leading lights of the conservative movement and their relationship to daddy, both their actual fathers and, you know, daddy as a figure, as a authority, as, yeah, as a kind of placeholder.
00:16:43.720like at the end of an episode of Scooby-Doo, where we pull the mask off the villain
00:16:47.460and discover that it's been Sigmund Freud all along.
00:16:50.020Uh, I think, you know, this is, uh, clearly one strain of thought that led at least the neocons to invest, uh, their ideological project a lot in psychoanalysis, but that's not who you're really talking about in, in this book. You're talking more about the movement conservatives.
00:17:10.560Right. You know, the neocons make an appearance, particularly in that kind of 1970s Irving Kristol and then leading into like Christopher Lash's work on on narcissism, because that movement absolutely does see the kind of broad condemnations in American culture in the late 1970s of the narcissistic personality as being in league or at least in the same universe as the cons of
00:17:40.560permissive, and overbearing, smothering kinds of authority that they want to associate with
00:17:48.160maternal, with the maternal presence. And we might, and we might for our listeners just very
00:17:53.540quickly sort of gloss all this. There is this long line of kind of critiques of overly soft
00:18:00.620child rearing or really self-making in America running, I guess, from, you know, something like
00:18:06.800Reefs, what is it? The Triumph of the Therapeutic via Lashes. What is that called? The Culture of
00:18:10.980Narcissism? Is that what it's called? Yeah. And then, you know, Bloom definitely partakes of that
00:18:15.980in The Closing of the American Mind. And as I joked earlier, the most recent iteration of this,
00:18:20.820I would say, which I think exactly exemplifies what you were just describing about how the
00:18:26.100downstream consequences of this coddling are terrible. It's basically Greg Lukianoff's and
00:18:31.000Jonathan Haidt's The Coddling of the American Mind from 2017. But there's a sustained line
00:18:36.420of books and articles that tell us that in some way there's this wrong kind of parental authority
00:18:43.400that is making Americans more fill in the blank here. And it usually has to do with going to
00:18:50.080therapy. We'll do anything but go to therapy, but as a discourse, yes.
00:18:55.200And it really revolves around the idea that imagining that children could have any kind of
00:19:01.380autonomy to determine their own wants and needs and desires is not simply wrong-headed.
00:19:07.220It is actually actively destructive of the possibilities of mature citizenship.
00:19:31.380So we've talked a bit about the character of submission as a kind of tutelary period
00:19:41.400that constitutes citizenship. Could you tell us a little bit more about the exercise of
00:19:45.940parental authority and its relation to the state in the conservative mind?
00:19:50.940Sure. So I think it's really keenly, it's illustrated in a lot of different ways,
00:19:56.720But I think it's keenly illustrated in my book in the analysis of Ronald Reagan's governing style, I suppose.
00:20:06.620And it was a governing style for Reagan that was consistent across his time as the governor of California and also when he was president of the United States.
00:20:14.380But his imagination led him to be very quick and self-righteous about exercising strong governing authority, what scholars might call a kind of politics of law and order, upon populations of, first in the case of California, student protesters who were typically centered in the University of California, Berkeley campus, but not only there.
00:20:44.380And then it emerges in even, in some ways, an even greater flower during Reagan's time as president in the way that he conducts the Iran, excuse me, the Contra War in Nicaragua.
00:20:58.440And the basic idea for him was that here you've got a bunch of kind of subversive, chaotic forces, whether they be immature student protesters on the campuses of the University of California or these sorts of revolutionaries, these Contras in Nicaragua, who are not behaving as responsible, mature political actors.
00:21:25.820And precisely because of that, they're behaving in ways that point to mounting chaos, that point to anarchy. They are behaving in such deeply immoral and irresponsible ways that they must be disciplined with the strong hand of the father.
00:21:44.280And when it comes to governmental force, that means militarization of police. It means calling out, for example, the National Guard to deal with student protesters in California. It means in the case of the Contra war while president, it means circumventing a whole series of congressional regulations and in a series of backdoor maneuvers funneling money from Iran to support this kind of revolutionary, counter-revolutionary force.
00:22:14.280Nicaragua, in spite of the fact that Reagan doesn't have the authority to do so. All of
00:22:19.680these people were understood as needing to have strong, paternally coded authority delivered to
00:22:27.440them. Having had the opportunity to behave maturely and having displayed their market
00:22:33.260immaturity instead, they were now subject and needed to be subject to the strong hand of the
00:22:38.580father in order to bring them back into line. And, you know, Reagan's version of that is illuminating
00:22:45.220and it's present, but it's in a lot of ways, the exact logic that is applied whenever you find a
00:22:51.700kind of get tough on crime narrative. It's almost always accompanied by a further projection of the
00:23:00.460community upon whom authority must be exercised. And that community is almost always represented
00:23:05.760as immature, irresponsible, undisciplined. And in the conservative imagination is almost always
00:23:12.380itself the product of bad parenting. Yeah. It strikes me that there's something about the
00:23:16.360conservative conception of immaturity that seems to contain a contradiction here, right? Because
00:23:21.740the undisciplined student radicals, say at Berkeley during Reagan's time as governor of California,
00:23:28.680or on campuses this week, are presented at once as sort of coddled, insufficiently disciplined
00:23:35.860children, and also as a threat to order that is serious enough to warrant quite violent
00:23:56.300But there is another that maybe you would be able to illuminate for us a little bit further that would show this as something that is particular to the way that conservatives imagine this immaturity.
00:24:10.640One of the things that surprised me, maybe the major thing that surprised me as I was working through this analysis, was the way in which it became clear to me that this kind of conservative imagination of, as I said, this mounting chaos of subversive forces that needed to be disciplined both at home and in the public sphere through the authority of government.
00:24:33.680It became clear to me over time that this narrative was at least as much about the people doing the disciplining as it was about, and maybe more so, about the people doing the disciplining as opposed to the subject populations who were on the receiving end of this discipline.
00:24:49.920And what I mean by that is that it became increasingly clear to me that when someone like Ronald Reagan, for example, is expressing his deep frustrations with student protesters in Berkeley who won't abide by university policies, or when he's expressing his outrage at the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua who will no longer support American interests, right?
00:25:15.580an American business interest, for example, in South America, that what he's actually doing is
00:25:21.920confessing a kind of insecurity about his own incapacity or seeming incapacity to control this
00:25:28.120situation. And so there's a way in which the narrative itself is this kind of confession
00:25:36.120of inadequacy on the part of conservative authority, that we take the very presence of
00:25:43.120these supposedly subversive and chaotic forces who will not comport to order. We are taking this
00:25:48.920personally. We are taking this as though these are accusations or as though these are what we
00:25:54.720might call a referenda on our vision of how authority should be exercised. And so that is
00:26:03.120what really kind of got me into the world of trying to understand how each of these three
00:26:09.960figures, Buckley, Reagan, and Thomas, have had themselves very freighted childhoods, and
00:26:16.920childhoods in which they were in fact exposed to the exact kind of unstinting order, paternal
00:26:23.220authority, uncontrolled, unstinting, uncompromising paternal authority that they recommend for
00:26:28.760others. But in the case of each of these three figures, it made their childhoods quite unstable,
00:26:36.020quite dysfunctional, even in a couple of cases, quite dangerous and abusive.
00:26:41.480And so I think this is sort of a roundabout way maybe of addressing your question more, but
00:26:46.860I think that the more that we begin to understand this conservative reverence for a very particular
00:26:54.460type of authority as being about conservatives themselves, rather than about the subject
00:27:00.800populations to whom they are exerting authority, we can start to unravel a lot of what appear to
00:27:06.540be hypocrisies or what appear to be tensions. And so that was a pretty key moment, I think,
00:27:12.340for me, as I was kind of putting it all together. Oh, this is actually about, this is more about
00:27:17.160them, or at least as much about them as it is about the people that they're castigating.
00:27:22.260That seems so right to me. I mean, especially with the beginnings of Reagan's first run for
00:27:27.100governor of California, right? For one thing, this fixation on the free speech movement at Berkeley
00:27:31.800and him kind of recognizing that other people are clearly, that it's catching on as a topic.
00:27:36.900And of course, like the fact that this is in the immediate aftermath or during the dissolution of,
00:27:41.900and this is something that some listeners may not know, of in loco parentis. So like,
00:27:45.900this is the moment when schools no longer can exercise exactly paternal authority. Well,
00:27:54.760they could they still do but but it's but sort of we're in the moment of transition and the reason
00:27:59.460his kind of anti-communist talking points catch on i think with a broader audience in california
00:28:05.720must have to do with the fact that this transition is felt as a insult to someone's authority right
00:28:12.300the schools will no longer enforce dress codes they will no longer enforce you know over overnight
00:28:18.320rules about whether kids can get a hotel room or whatever who are 22 years old or whatever right1.00
00:28:24.440And I think that that's exactly right. It is about the people who felt that certain power was theirs and feel called to question by this change.
00:28:35.660One of the things that's also interesting, of course, is that on the one hand, it's a kind of projection, but it's also, of course, an immense act of self-flattery.
00:28:44.060I often have to think about the fact, right, that like Reagan's term for the free speech movement was always the filthy speech movement, which is that it's always so freaking juvenile, isn't it?
00:28:55.800Right. Like, oh, it's filthy. Like, I don't know, maybe it sounded different in 1965, but I'm like, there's like potty humor almost.0.90
00:29:01.800And the way that you can tell yourself that like, I am a grown ass actor reading to these people at, you know, let's say, you know, a multipurpose hall in San Francisco about, you know, things that happened at the Vietnam Day party at Berkeley.
00:29:17.920And I'm going to linger on like short skirts and dope smoking and three rock bands and like a lava lamp.
00:29:28.080No one comes off well making that complaint.
00:29:30.640But if you can tell people, no, no, no, your prurience, your voyeurism, your overinvestment is actually a sign of maturity, right?
00:29:39.000You wallow in these, your children wallow in these depths because they can't help themselves.
00:29:43.060You wallow because ogling co-eds is actually good politics for the older generation, right?
00:29:49.300Like there's also just immense mission structure there, isn't there?
00:29:52.440That basically your immaturity is now maturity by my paternal fiat almost.
00:29:57.980Yeah, there's a way in which – and that's all very well put, Adrian – there's a way in which the confession of one's own desires – that's what's happening, I think, when Reagan, for example, is lauding these crowds with these graphic depictions of supposed impurities that are happening on the campus and amongst college protesters.
00:30:20.080he is he's enjoying this he's luxuriating there's a pleasure for sure that he's getting in doing this
00:30:26.360and his audience is also finding themselves very very pleasure um this is very pleasure inducing
00:30:32.700enjoying this this is the the confession of the desire that you can then um portray as though
00:30:38.940it's a matter of concern right my my interest here is i'm concerned for these people right
00:30:44.060And so concern becomes the the hinge, the linguistic hinge through which desire and pleasure is converted into something that is understood to be or at least portrayed as being more high minded and more dedicated to the sort of the public wheel.
00:31:00.740I wonder if we might turn, if this might be an appropriate moment to turn to like kind of a methodological question, right? Because this book like takes conservatism's account of itself pretty seriously, right? It does not declare as a lot of sort of like accounts of conservative thought from left of that movement tend to do that a lot of their professed interest is in fact just kind of like pretext or window dressing, right?
00:31:29.960And that like, you know, what's really going on is this other issue. It does, it sort of assumes that conservatives are at least somewhat right about their own preoccupations and the substance of them, right?
00:31:41.900So can you tell us about what it was like for you to sort of spend a lot of time taking these people sort of at their word to some degree?
00:31:53.000And how was that as like a writer and a critical thinker to engage with?
00:32:00.500How easy, I think, is my question within my question, my hidden question, is like how easy does it become or how difficult does it become to take conservatives' accounts of their own movement seriously when you spend prolonged time with them like this?
00:32:11.320Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, Laura. And it's one that I struggled with for a long time. I think it's very difficult in the first place to take seriously the self-depictions of people with whom you don't agree, basically anything.
00:32:29.440And it's very tempting to want to see those self-depictions and self-descriptions as, as you say, pretense or as cover for what their real interests are.
00:32:41.580And I've tried to resist doing that because I think when you pay attention to the way that people talk about themselves, and I mean people generally, not simply American conservatives, I think you learn a lot about how it is that they come to understand their place in the world and how they come to justify what their interests are in the first place.
00:33:05.880And so I try not to imagine these self-depictions and the visions that they articulate for the Commonwealth as sort of verbal cover for other real interests or as window dressing.
00:33:25.280But by taking them seriously, I think we learned that there's real power, in other words, in understanding that people are being serious when they talk.
00:33:42.900Even if there is a degree of calculation, even if there's a degree of instrumentality, right?
00:33:48.280And for sure there is. Anytime a public figure comes into a situation in which they're trying to persuade a broad audience of their position, there is always going to be a factor of calculation and instrumentality. How best can I put this that will seem most persuasive? On the other hand, it's only going to be persuasive if the speaker themselves believes what they're saying.
00:34:07.800And so I've tried to make sure that I can balance those things. And I think you can take seriously what people say without being persuaded by it or without being particularly sympathetic to their position.
00:34:20.800And it is for sure it is sometimes difficult because some figures, I think, in particular, some public figures in particular are much more calculating and instrumental than others are.
00:34:34.620And so when you encounter someone like that, it can be more difficult to remind yourself that the goal here intellectually is to take the person's words seriously.
00:34:43.640I asked this question, and I so appreciate your answer, because I am, I'm a journalist, I cover the Supreme Court for The Guardian, among other things. And something I have been really sort of perplexed by over the past few years is how to reconcile Clarence Thomas specifically, both as a politician, I think it's fair to call him, who is very strategic and has very long term sort of projects, but who also has a tendency to sort of say the quiet part out loud.
00:35:12.480And, you know, I was thinking a lot in particular when I read your book about his concurrence in Dobbs and his sort of program of future challenges to particularly like sexual gender rights and privacy precedents that he is sort of inviting in these cases for the court.
00:35:29.680And this is somebody who very clearly understands domestic patriarchal authority. And I mean, patriarchal in the kind of literal sense, not just as a metaphor for state power, but really as a model of state power in some quite explicit ways. How do you read a guy like Clarence Thomas? And how have you been reading him in the years since this book came out?
00:35:53.560That's a great question. I think it was a lot easier. I don't know if my analysis would be terribly different if I were to rewrite it now, but I will absolutely admit that he has become considerably more willing on the bench to comment on matters. He's been considerably more willing to write concurring and dissenting opinions.
00:36:15.980So there's more visibility, it seems to me, for his jurisprudential vision than maybe what we had before. But there are considerable through lines with Thomas to the, I don't know, pre-2016 or 2017 version of his time on the court and his current times.
00:36:34.720And I think the through lines have to do with his propensity to see everything through a kind of, not just a patriarchal vision, but through a very particular vision of his childhood, right?
00:36:47.200As I hear that, what's interesting about Thomas is that it seems like he really truly feels like everything that he needed to know about how the world works, he learned when he was eight years old.
00:36:59.020Maybe for our listeners, I'm sorry to interrupt, maybe for our listeners who don't know much about the biography of Clarence Thomas and the particulars of his childhood, could you give a quick gloss?
00:37:09.700Yeah, so Clarence Thomas was born in one of the Sea Islands or a place near the Sea Islands in Georgia called Pinpoint, Georgia. It's a tiny little hamlet. And it was one of the sort of the freed slave communities during the time of Reconstruction.
00:37:26.860His mother and his brother, and he moved to Savannah, Georgia, when he was very young. And Clarence Thomas's birth father left the family when he was a baby. He never really knew him.
00:37:42.060And he and his brother lived with their mother who worked and did domestic work for local white families and usually had to work multiple jobs just to sustain the household.
00:37:57.860And she became so overwhelmed with the joint project of parenting and making a living that she would rely upon her own parents who also lived in Savannah to do a lot of the parenting.
00:38:10.860This is not actually that unusual of a story, right? I mean, there's lots of cases in which extended family does considerable amount of parenting. But Clarence always interpreted this, Clarence Thomas interprets this, the moving into the grandparents' house is the key moment in his life. It's the most important thing that ever happened to him.
00:38:29.080He writes over and over again, and he said this in multiple speeches in his memoirs, because it's the moment at which he argues that he was transferred from a kind of state of paternal authority to a state of unstinting paternal authority and exactly the kinds of things that we've been talking about.
00:38:45.660Because his grandfather was a very strict, very uncompromising and unstinting person who was, by Thomas's account, not infrequently physically abusive and quite disinterested in the wants and needs and desires of the grandchildren and an extreme disciplinarian by Clarence Thomas's accounts.
00:39:15.660And so it's that backdrop in which Clarence Thomas confesses that this is the most important thing that ever happened to him. It's within that backdrop that he derives nothing but positive life lessons from this experience of kind of overwhelming subjection to external authority, that he argues that these were the things that turned him from a kind of an insolent and lazy five year old.
00:39:43.360I mean, I don't know how. I've yet to meet the five-year-old that's not insolent.
00:39:48.360I know. But in his mind, he conjures this reality in which he is especially indolent and especially lazy, and that it is the experience of this overwhelming authority from his grandfather and his grandfather's house that he begins these life lessons that turn him into a focused, disciplined, capable person.
00:40:11.480someone capable of deferring the immediate gratification of their desires into long-term
00:40:18.700goals and interests. And that experience of authority never goes away. It becomes,
00:40:28.260according to Thomas, the key lesson of his life that he returns to over and over and over again.
00:40:33.600Whenever he finds himself in periods of personal crisis, he recalls these lessons of harsh
00:40:40.200external authority and the character qualities that he claims they instilled in him as the
00:40:45.540bedrock foundations of his life and of his capabilities. And then he also manages to
00:40:51.140convert that into an actual jurisprudence, an actual theory of how to read law, of how to
00:40:57.580interpret law, which is what I found to be. That was also something that I found to be really kind
00:41:05.660of a key point at which I was able to unlock a lot of things is that in Thomas's vision,
00:41:11.540what Supreme Court justices are supposed to do is they are supposed to go back and discover the
00:41:18.780desires of the people who wrote the legislation under question. And they are then supposed to
00:41:27.280inhabit those desires. So the wants of the fathers, metaphorically speaking,
00:41:33.060and then to use those desires as their interpretive lenses according which to make
00:41:39.460sense of what it is that the court should be doing. So he continues, Thomas does, in his
00:41:46.320jurisprudence to argue that the most important possible things that he can do are to maintain
00:41:54.480his position in thrall to fatherly authority. And so it's this kind of unbroken through line.
00:42:00.060It changes venues in a certain way, but it's this kind of unbroken through law in which subjection as a child to fatherly authority is akin to the judge's subjection to the timeless authority of the fathers in the legal text.
00:42:17.300I mean, I love that the way you're describing it. Also, I mean, there are a couple of things that it calls to mind, right? One is that this kind of, you know, we've talked about the kind of hypostatization, this almost like overemphasis on maturity in this discourse, but it's also, of course, the opposite, this hypostatization of immaturity, right?
00:42:35.440The fact that, you know, for instance, right now, it seems like national media cannot grant our college students one thing, which is that they genuinely believe the things that they say they believe in and for which they are camping out on college campuses.
00:42:50.740No, it has to be. But anything other than that, and this promise that others are immature, of course, in the case of Clarence Thomas, is a kind of ex post facto identification with the aggressor.
00:43:01.200It's saying he was right to do it, right?
00:43:04.480Like the same way that, you know, St. Augustine before his conversion is basically always like shockingly bad.0.53
00:43:10.240And you're like, come on, you were probably, how many pear trees can one kid really, you know, really rob?
00:43:17.660But the idea is, right, to create this kind of particularly overemphasized base version of yourself that can then be redeemed.
00:43:25.820And that's kind of what's happening here, right?
00:43:27.200As you say, like the idea I was an insolent five-year-old, like, yeah, or you were a five-year-old.
00:43:32.900But the fact that there is this kind of emphasis on this almost superhuman immaturity that would have continued forever, right?
00:43:43.840He would have continued to be a five-year-old forever had his grandfather not intervene is, of course, an ex post facto reconciliation of like, I love this person and this person really hurt me.
00:43:54.640And, yeah, it's extremely powerful in that way.
00:43:59.420Yeah, and as you say that, Adrian, it calls to mind, there is a kind of a Stockholm syndrome element to, and it's not just Thomas.
00:44:07.320It occurs in all three of the major figures whom I investigate, and I would argue, or I would submit, is at the root of this form of authority discourse, which is we all experienced horrible positions of abusive childhoods.
00:44:23.400We experienced all of this kind of authority, and actually, it was all good. We didn't appreciate it. We weren't mature enough to appreciate it. I would also say, just to return to the case of Clarence Thomas, that the one thing that makes him unusual, I think, as compared to Buckley or Reagan, is that I think there's a certain recognition from Thomas that the unbroken line that connects his subjection to authority, to his grandfather's authority, to
00:44:53.400his subjection to the authority of the founders of the Republic or the authors of the constitutional
00:44:59.400text. I think there's some recognition of, as much as he celebrates that as a watchword of
00:45:05.100virtuous democratic citizenship, I think that there's also a sense in him that there's some
00:45:09.420regret there. He imagines himself that he's still a powerless child, essentially, and that he is not,
00:45:18.100By his own definition, he is not behaving as a mature, capable judge would behave.
00:45:24.980He's cowering before the authority of George Washington, or no, of the framers or whatever.
00:45:31.380Right, that there's a way in which there's, maybe it's, and it may not rise to the level
00:45:35.820of consciousness necessarily with him, but there seems to be some recognition of the
00:45:39.440kind of the dead-endedness of this story of progression, right?
00:45:43.360The story of progression is that when subjected to harsh discipline and unstinting, these kinds
00:45:48.820of character quality forms of paternal discipline as a child, and having learned those lessons
00:45:53.520properly, that there will be a point at which one takes on the mantle of maturity and capability
00:45:58.580themselves. And instead, what seems to be happening, and I think Thomas has some awareness
00:46:04.300of that, is that you don't ever actually get out of that relationship of tutelary authority.
00:46:09.500Either you're a biological child to private authority at home, or you are a metaphorically a judicial child to the timeless dictates of the authors of the text.
00:46:30.960At the end of the day, all you're doing is being a relay transmitter for the timeless desires of either a biological or a metaphorical father.
00:46:37.880And this is something where I think, you know, our listeners may have made the connection already, but it's worth kind of spelling out because we started sort of with Buckley and got a man at Yale, that of course, like, the charge is, to some extent, Yale is too maternal.
00:46:53.200Yale is luring young men away from their father's dictates, right?
00:46:56.640His main charge against Yale is you take money from a bunch of Christian individualists, and then you take their sons and turn them into godless socialists, and you're luring them, basically.
00:47:10.480And that's a monstrous maternal authority that's being imagined there.
00:47:16.540And I think that's pretty key here, too, that on the one hand, there are paternal authorities that sort of get venerated and that one understands oneself always already in subjection to.
00:47:25.240But then there are these maternal, these illegitimate maternal authorities that basically are trying to seduce you with, you know, their promises of, you know, knowledge or free love or whatever it is.
00:47:39.100Or easy wealth. Yeah, I think that's exactly it. This is a common sort of culture war line about universities, right? That students go off to universities and apparently in the more elite the university, the worse apparently, the malady, sort of the culture war line that, you know, they go off as sort of well-disciplined, proto-mature human beings.
00:48:06.840And after, I don't know, three days on campus, they're brainwashed into a series of, you know, immature political positions, crazy kinds of beliefs, you know, just completely transformed, totally different.
00:48:22.280They've been corrupted intellectually and emotionally. And there is the sense that they've, that their proto maturity has been the source of, according to which they've been preyed on by these sort of nefarious forces who have been engaged in this sort of mind control game.
00:48:36.720or exercise. You know, I mean, countless, I mean, how many undergrads can recall going home
00:48:43.280after their first semester, their first quarter and getting in the mildest of disagreements with
00:48:47.860one of their parents, which then become a major conflagration. And it might be tempting to say,
00:48:54.260well, maybe this is just people who are experiencing sort of quasi-independence or
00:48:58.320independence for the first time in their lives. And they're, you know, coming to their own,
00:49:03.180coming into themselves, right? That would be, it seems to me, a fairly anodyne and obvious way to
00:49:08.400interpret the situation. But according to the conservative imagination, no, what's happened
00:49:13.120here is not the ordinary process of maturation, but rather this kind of nefarious outside and
00:49:20.220external control that elites, in this case, intellectual and cultural elites, have exerted
00:49:25.900upon um otherwise proto mature and capable citizens they were all brilliant 16 year olds and
00:49:34.240now they're 19 and infected with the woke mind virus exactly it's it's it's a kind of it's a
00:49:38.760story of degeneration of of growth in reverse almost yeah i think that's exactly right i think
00:49:44.180this might be a great place to stop i think you guys just landed on it so beautifully jeff dudas
00:49:48.820thank you so much for being with us i find myself really envying your students you've got such a
00:49:52.900great pedagogical model uh that i feel like i was just like taken along on a beautiful stroll
00:49:58.780through a weird landscape so thank you i will say more some some years ago i ditched powerpoint
00:50:05.860and went back to just kind of a a much more discursive kind of approach and um
00:50:13.820student i mean students were you know they were kind of alarmed at first
00:50:19.900There are no PowerPoint slides up there for them to pay attention to.
00:50:24.620But I mean, it's been something that I think was a good move pedagogically for me.