 Hi, it's Think Tech and this is History Lens. I'm John David and the host of the show and today we have with us Dr. Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins who is a scholar from Yale University and Dr. Jenkins is the specialist on religion and the rise of neoconservativism in religion and the rise and fall of secularism. He's currently got a book under contract with Columbia University Press entitled The Neoconservative Moment in France, Raymond Aaron and the United States and he's working on another book, The Rise and Fall of Global Secularism Since the Cold War and Daniel's here this week in Hawaii to give a lecture at Hawaii Pacific University on religious liberty and the rise of neoconservativism. So Daniel, thanks for being on the show. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Great stuff. So when we think about, can we get some definition? So how do you define neoconservativism? Well, that's an interesting question. I think when most people think of neoconservativism they think of the foreign policy inspirations behind the Bush administration's decision to conduct a war in Iraq as a result of 9-11 and the fear of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So typically I think when people think of neoconservativism they think of maybe the foreign policy hawks behind the Bush administration or maybe the foreign policy audiology of Paul Wolfowitz. But it actually has a much longer history. It's a term that was used to describe a more conservative wing of the Democratic Party or at least some intellectuals in the Democratic Party in the mid to late 1960s who didn't like the direction that the party was taking under Johnson and they didn't specifically like the rise of the new left and they didn't like the direction of American foreign policy after as a result of the Vietnam War, very concerned in fact that because of the Vietnam War the United States was losing the Cold War and so they in many ways began to critique, if you will, the orientation of the Democratic Party in the late 1960s early 1970s and eventually wound up by the time of Reagan's rise and wound up in the Republican Party. So it's a bit of a different history than maybe the one that most people are familiar with in terms of the Iraq War. It goes back a couple of decades longer and different concerns depending on which decade. But in terms of religion, neoconservative religious types, where do they stand and what's their kind of what's their agenda? Well that's an interesting question. One could make the argument that many neoconservatives were not religious at all. They were in fact maybe culturally conservative and therefore because of that realized and recognized the importance role that religion plays in society and specifically allowing for a kind of traditional value system to be maintained. So you have, you know, there are people who don't like being called neoconservatives. One would be Daniel Bell who wrote this book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism where he basically suggested that the kind of capitalism that had made American political economy successful was inseparable from a kind of Protestant work ethic and that the new left in the 1960s in some sense their lifestyle contradicted that kind of Protestant work ethic. So in that sense there's kind of a, if you will, for strategic reasons and functionalist reasons a kind of value for religion in society. It has a restraining effect and it's not by coincidence that many neoconservatives in the 1970s, I mean, they joined forces whether knowingly or unknowingly with evangelicals who were also mobilized in the early, in the late 1970s with Jerry Falwell to present kind of two of the main ideological foundations of the Republican Party. So whether neoconservatives are actually religious or not, maybe it's not the important question, it's how they viewed religion and its role in society. Okay, so in a sense their ideas that we need, that they themselves are not religious but we need religion to serve as a kind of structure in society and to preserve values and show people the right path. Yeah, interestingly enough, I mean, yeah, it's a cultural, form of cultural conservatism and it somehow, although not a neoconservative, been revived in the United States, at least that rhetoric with this idea of making America great again. And if you look at someone like Steve Bannon, the whole idea is that you need this Judeo-Christian tradition to kind of curb the excesses of kind of a sort of decadent lifestyle that would explain the rise of the 2008 financial crisis. So now that's becoming very clear now. Okay, so and that helps, that helps us to understand I think in the, on the contemporary scene, you know, why the evangelicals are so attached to Trump. If I'm articulating this correctly, then it's a values issue, not necessarily a religion issue itself, because of course, Trump is not a religious person, by any means, he seems to be just the opposite, right, an amoral person. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to infuse terms here. I think the neoconservatives that I have in mind are actually quite critical of Trump, mainly for, main reason would be for foreign policy reasons. But the argument that I was making is something that I share in common, perhaps, with maybe someone like Steve Bannon would be the restraining effects that religion can have on curbing kind of certain excesses, and cultivating certain virtues that would, if you will, cultivate good spending habits instead of ones that lead to bad decisions, which Steve Bannon, interestingly enough, thought that was connected to why the 2008 financial crisis happened. There was too much, you know, this restraining tradition wasn't in place. But that's different actually, though, than the neoconservatives. That's a different, they're moving, many are moving away from the Republican Party now, or they're critical of Trump, they don't like Trump. And as you mentioned, Trump isn't really, doesn't seem to be the most religious of people, even though his admirers, many of his admirers in the United States, do admire him. He presents a conundrum, I think, for many believers who are voting for him because of... Yeah. Yeah. I would think it would be a huge problem for religious people to vote for Trump because of his, you know, kind of out in the open amorality, right? Right. Or even immorality, right? Well, yeah, I mean, it's a challenging to explain the kind of ways that religious groups have gone about justifying their support for Donald Trump, knowing that his own lifestyle in many ways contradicts their own faith. And of course, you know, one could just say that he gives them what they want. He'll have the Johnson amendment, he gives them, you know, maybe the Supreme Court just, justices that they want. Right. And in exchange, he gets their support. And this is kind of a pragmatic relationship. Yeah. It also could be a very theologically inspired view of Trump, which is that he's kind of analogous to Cyrus, a great king in the Hebrew Bible, who allowed for the end of the Babylonian captivity and for the Jews to return to their homeland. And even though he's a pagan king, he allows for... God uses such a person for redemptive purposes. But yeah, there's all kinds of ways to try to figure out that relationship. This is what I've heard, is that Trump is a broken vessel. Right. But the key is the vessel. Right. It's brokenness doesn't really matter if he can move things along in a way that religious people think. So, okay, so that's kind of, so there's some, there's apparently some, quite some variation among what we call neoconservatives or religious fundamentalist, religious evangelicals who support Trump. You're saying, can you say a little bit more about neoconservatives who are actually moving away from Trump? Yeah, I mean, if you listen to someone like Crystal, for example, the son of Irving Crystal, I mean, very critical of the Trump administration, if you were to look at someone like Kagan, someone who's always been a promoter of American responsibility abroad, something what they perceive to be the isolationism of Donald Trump's foreign policy is a step in the wrong direction. Right. And this was the same concern that many of the early neoconservatives had regarding what they considered to be a kind of Vietnam syndrome that had taken over the American foreign policy establishment in the 70s, exemplified through detente and strategic arms limitation talks, but also through the turn of international human rights from the car administration. So, and the idea was that actually we don't, we're underestimating the threat of the Soviet Union, right? Just like maybe if you talk to some neoconservatives today, we're underestimating the threat of democracy, whether it be Islam or whether it be China, for instance, and we have to have a strong view of America's role in the world. In many ways, there are some parallels with the older neoconservatives from the 70s and their children today, even though one major difference is the criticism of the Republican Party today by neoconservatives. So, you're referring to Robert Kagan and the writer, the historian. Right. Yes, correct. Yes. Okay, so, okay, so that makes more sense. These are kinds of the neocons that came out of the woodwork when we entered Iraq, right? Right. Iraq war in 2003. And, okay, so can you take us back a little bit and talk about that the neoconservative movement that you study in your, I assume this was your dissertation that it became your first book? Right, yes. Well, I mean, I guess the purpose of the book is to try to suggest that even the story about the rise of neoconservatives in the late 1960s and the early 1970s is a limited one in so far as that story typically focuses on the United States. In the 1960s, you had, again, a group of what you could describe as vital center liberals, new dealers that were not happy with the Johnson's Great Society program. We're not happy with some of the directions that the Democratic Party was taking in the 1960s. And there's also, as I mentioned, this thing about foreign policy, but this is actually a transatlantic phenomena and it can't be just reduced to the United States. You had similar concerns in Germany, for instance, and in France. And one of the major concerns was the student protest movements that, especially in the late 60s, that kind of rock college campuses and, of course, France, Paris would be the obvious, one of the biggest examples, the May 68 student protest movements, but also in Germany, also Berkeley, Columbia. There seemed to be a concern about this new generation of students and the demands that they were making and that these demands somehow went against or were a threat, if you will, to kind of the great accomplishments of the post-war welfare state. And so the issue became trying to explain why a group of middle-class, generally economically stable college students at some of these elite schools were so discontent. And many, such as Daniel Bell, for instance, said, well, we can only explain this at the level of culture. There's cultural discontent. And the fight for recognition amongst new groups seeking equality, whether it be women, gays, et cetera, they explained this at the level of culture. And then they quickly, Daniel Bell was famous for saying, in terms of culture, I'm a conservative, in terms of politics, I'm a liberal, in terms of economics, I'm a socialist. But I think that's a true statement. I mean, like, you have to have all three for him, right? For him, you had to be a kind of cultural conservative, if you wanted the political economy of the New Deal, right? And it was these, if you will, these students who are disrupting this because their culture wasn't that of the New Deal, which was based on a Fordist model of the family, and it was quite conservative. So there was kind of a cultural turn, if you will, amongst these kind of vital center liberals. And they recognized, okay, that culture is imploding. We have to somehow address this. And this also is an element of the neo-conserv movement that you find not just in the United States, but in France as well, I make the argument in the book that something like this is a concern of someone like Raymond Aueron, the great French liberal, who's very struck by the student protest movements, famously calling them a carnival and a psychodrama, and very conservative. In a negative way. In a very negative way. Carnival, he meant that the professors were behaving like students and the students were behaving like professors and that the I did, that's it, right? Yeah, exactly. And we hold it there, Danny, we're gonna have to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to talk more about the rise of neoconservatism. I'm fascinated by it. So, okay, we'll be back in a minute. Thanks. Hello, I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's just kind of scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on thinktecawaii.com 1pm on Friday afternoons. And then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up. And please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you. Keeping you safe. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Wendy Lo and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at 2 o'clock live from thinktecawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body, and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about, whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means. Let's take healthy back. Aloha. All right, we're back. We're live with Daniel Steinmetz, Jankin from Yale, and we're talking about the rise of neoconservatism in the United States and in Europe. And we were talking Daniel, we were talking about the these young protesters and how new dealers who accepted the liberalism of the New Deal, but were really repelled by this. They were cultural conservatives who were repelled by the kind of, I suppose what they saw is that the nihilism and the the kind of created as you go spirit of these young students. Right. Yeah, one thing that I should say, many of these neoconservatives were some of the biggest proponents in the 1950s of what was described as the end of ideology, which is this notion that with the welfare state and with kind of a certain political economy, revolutionary ideologies wouldn't be necessary because you had the necessary safety net in place to allow for the workers to have basic security. And I think what happened with these kind of end of ideologists who became neoconservatives, they quickly realized that actually you need more than just the welfare state and you need more than just a certain form of political governance, you need a certain kind of culture. And that has that goes a long way explaining the the neoconservative turn, it's a cultural turn, right? Okay, it's not just tweaking the economy, it's not just technocracy, it's actually culture as well. And so yeah, there was great. And the students represented, if you will, cultural, I mean, discontent with with that kind of conformist culture, kind of a very and that they aren't cage of modernity, right? Exactly, man, this the suit going up and down the elevator, day after day, a deadening, right, a deadening of human life. And that's interesting. You mentioned it because many of these end of ideologists were actually very much influenced by Max Weber. Yeah, and the concerns about bureaucracy. So that's that that's absolutely okay, you're talking about the neocons as well. The Neoconservatives early these early these early ones that I have in mind where we're kind of a barrier and an outlook. But I think you can take what I'm saying, though, and you can kind of put the pieces together. If you think of it as if you think of the New Deal as entailing a certain kind of culture, which is quite conservative, you would see why, even if you're an atheist, but you're a new dealer and you're in your cultural conservative, why something like why why there would be an acceptance of something like the evangelical movement, because they provide you with that conservative culture, right? That's and so even though you might find their ideas totally ridiculous. Well, the national audience for Billy Graham in the 1950s, right? Yeah, kind of, he's a national figure, right? It doesn't matter if you're Lutheran or Baptist or or Methodist or congregationless, right? He's like, Oh, he's, he's our kind of national pastor. Yeah. And that's interesting, because the pastor before him, at least the national one, I think the person that typically it's associated with that was Reinhold Niebuhr, who was actually quite different than Billy Graham and had very critical things to say about Billy Graham. But one has to ask the question, well, why not a Reinhold Niebuhr type Protestant liberal figure and instead a Billy Graham kind of evangelical cultural conservative figure. And one of the reasons is because mainline Protestantism by the 1970s is slowly beginning to undo itself because the very kids who are becoming critical of culture are the children of mainline denominate, they attend the mainline churches. In other words, their children are rejecting their conservatism. So they're becoming secular, they're not around anymore. Okay, what are their religious group is there? Oh, there's these evangelicals who were all over the political map in the 40s and the 50s. Now they're being mobilized for political purposes. They kind of in some sense replace. But yeah, I mean, isn't it, isn't it true that that the evangelicals, especially fundamentalists in the period from the 1920s into the 1920s, were considered kind of cranks and kind of, you know, euphuses by by the kind of the Eastern elites and the intelligentsia, right? I mean, you know, they make a lot of fun of the evangelicals in the 1920s. Right. Well, what's, you know, I think sometimes we have ways of viewing the so-called fundamentalists that does, I think, exhibit the kind of reputation that you just described as being anti-modern and kind of uneducated, anti-intellectual, anti-secular, and so forth. Well, it rings bells for me in the present day, honest. There's been a way of the scholarship to kind of call those things in the question, but there's there's a reason why that I think there's probably still something to it nonetheless. But in the 1950s, you have a new evangelical movement that breaks away from this, even in the 40s, that breaks away from this fundamentalism that is much more invested in culture and in mainstream American society. And that's Billy Graham, right? Okay. So, so in other words, you have the rise of the evangelicals, and you have the decline, if you will, of the mainline protestants. And at the very moment where these neo-conservatives are worried, worried about mores and culture, so they can't rely really on those liberal protestants, because they're kind of dying out, even though they're kind of still there, but they can rely on this new group that's now mobilized in the Republican Party for the first time. Okay. And so the, and thus they move into the Republican Party at that point. Yeah, exactly. This very moment that the evangelicals are mobilized into the Republican Party to support Reagan is the very moment that many of these vital center, you know, lifelong Democrats leave the Democratic Party and become Republicans. Right. And it's also at this very moment to where another group joins, well, another group forms kind of a pillar of ideology of the Republican Party. That's the neoliberals. Okay. And so you have the neoliberals, the neo-conservatives and the evangelicals come together. And what's interesting is those groups are kind of kind of coming apart today because of the Trump administration. Okay. Well, that's that's good news. But there is a question here. And my question is in the Reagan era, then, why didn't the evangelicals embrace Reagan more readily? Maybe it's the other way around. Maybe it's just that Reagan had just so little time for evangelicals that he didn't actually implement much of the agenda of evangelicals. Right. I mean, he tried a little bit. Right. Well, I mean, I think he's able to cater to them. It's fascinating that you know, the president, of course, before Reagan was Jimmy Carter, a Democrat and an evangelical. Right. That's right. And I think received the majority of evangelical support. But at that point, the evangelicals weren't mobilized the same way that they were under Reagan. But you know, if you recall the National Prayer Breakfast what in 1980 1981, Reagan uses the language of evil empire to describe the Soviet Union. True. That's a language that would have been familiar with many evangelicals because they were huge readers of how Lindsey is the lake, great planet earth and which had a very similar view of the Soviet Union. Right. Reagan was whether consciously or not use that rhetoric and that's kind of language that they would understand. And so maybe, you know, supposedly he attended church less than any other president, yet he was he still to this day is admired, I think by by the evangelical community without a doubt. So perhaps he could have done more, but he was effective. Well, he really fits your definition of the Neoconservatives of that time, right? Because he was a new dealer. Yeah, that's right. But he hated the the 60s protesters. That's right. Kind of the chaos that he felt they created. Exactly. And he did nothing to undermine the new deal. Right. I mean, you know, the tax reform, you could say, okay, but other than that, I mean, he's really not taking down the new deal. Not not like current, the current reform. Yeah, I mean, maybe we overemphasize that. And you know, when we start stressing the influence of the neoliberals on the Reagan administration, and with thatcher as well, the fact that supposedly Hayek and people like Milton Friedman were were a real influence on those administrations. Maybe we go too far. And and and trying to stress that influence and project maybe 2008 into 1980 or 1978 or whatever. But yeah, maybe, maybe that that that the very well could be the case. Okay, so, so we're almost out of time. But bring us up to the present day. I mean, you're talking about a fracturing of the Neoconservative movement. And I know you're working on a book on religion and populism. Is this book contemporary? Or is it go back in as historical as well? I'm sure. But are you bringing it up to the Yeah, I'm actually working on this, like a trade press book on religion and populism. You know, there are many different ways to explain what populism is we struggle as academics to even, you know, articulate what is the essence of populism. It seems to me that most of the ways that scholars go about it is to say that it's a problem of political representation. That's one. People don't feel represented by their parties or their party leaders. And someone from the outside comes, you know, rises and says, Oh, I can I can represent your system is rigged. I can represent you. Well, that sounds very familiar. This is this is one explanation for populism. It's a political explanation has very little to do with economics. Then there's the economic explanation, which says there is this kind of global financial system that's run by Davos elites, and people are putting their money offshore. And this the the economic system is neoliberal, and it's not functioning properly. We need to kind of have a Brexit, or we need to, you know, close down the EU, or we need to have tariffs, or we need to become isolationist, or we need a fair distribution of wealth. So distribution of wealth is economics is the second explanation. I think those explanations for populism go a long way in explaining what's going on. But one thing that strikes me that about those explanations is they don't really they don't explain why, for instance, why, why, why are so many religious citizens in particular, and enthusiastic about an Erdogan in Turkey, or by about the kind of traditionalist discourse of Christian democracy in Hungary under Orban, or evangelicals with Bolsonaro in Brazil, or evangelicals with the Judeo Christian tradition, the United States, which they somehow associate with Trump, or the list goes on, we can mention many examples, and the relationship between religion and populism, and right wing populism, those two other explanations, the economic and the political explanation don't seem to provide answers for that. That's true. They don't fit. They don't fit. Democrats currently in 2020 are going to run on economic populism. Yeah. So okay, so so what fits then? I mean, just did we've got like 30 seconds? Well, I think many people on the left are hesitant to look at the role that values play in why maybe a populist candidate is appealing. And all the examples that I just mentioned, whether it's Bolsonaro, whether it's Orban, or whether it's, you know, Trump or whoever fill in the blank, they're all promoting kind of a kind of traditionalism. They all kind of look at, in many ways, Putin, who's not really a populist, but they look at Putin as a kind of way of providing an alternative to Western secularism. And so it's really, I think you have to take into consideration meaning and values and and trying to come up with a sense of collective understanding based on tradition. Yeah, that's providing, if you will, ways of dealing with automation and international capital that so it's in way it's in a way, it's really not religion, but it sounds like Western civilization, plus religion like, yeah, it's it's the discourse, if you will, of some kind of civilizationism, it's the discourse of some kind of value system that in some ways, you want to use the language of Karl Pellani, the the it provides a way of dealing with capitalism, the disembedding effect, the dizzying effect of capitalism by encasing capitalism within tradition, within a particular value system. That's very interesting. I think that's the thing that needs to be emphasized a little bit more, not to the detriment of those other two, but to combine those three together would be I think a way to go. But we're going to have to stop here. But Daniel, thanks so much for coming in. Thanks. Great to have you. Do an in for another episode.