 Hello, my friends, and welcome to the 29th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. I'm your host, Steve Patterson, and as you might imagine today, with the upcoming presidential election in the United States, we're talking about politics. To join me, I'm speaking with a man who has been teaching at Harvard University for more than two of my lifetimes. I'm speaking with the distinguished Dr. Harvey Mansfield, who has been a professor at Harvard since 1962. But before we start, I want to give a special round of shout-out to some new Patreon supporters. Mike Fursing, Brent Bowers, Brian Miller, Michael J. Ziegura, and Steve Wilson. Thank you all so much for contributing to the show and helping create our rational worldview. And thank you to the more than 50 other patrons who are also helping to support the show. In addition, I've just added a PayPal option on my website if you want to support the show that way, and I've already got some people donating through PayPal, so thank you all so much. So what's interesting about Dr. Mansfield is he's a conservative at Harvard and has been that way for quite a long time. As you can imagine, he's seen a lot of things. So being a conservative, I wanted to ask him about this crazy 2016 election. What his thoughts are on Trump. And he's also known for having some slightly provocative ideas about welfare, about political correctness, and even about my favorite topic, academia. At the end of this interview, he shares his analysis of the current state of academia and some interesting stories back when there was a lot of student demonstrations in the 60s. So seeing what he has seen and having the worldview that he does, he was very sympathetic to some of my criticisms of academia. As I know, you guys, the listeners are as well. So if you're currently going to college or thinking of going to college but not sure, the sponsor for the show is the company Praxis, which specializes in taking young people who are ambitious and want a taste of the real world, either out of academia or before they go into academia, and placing them at a paid apprenticeship. The Praxis program is three months of professional boot camp, which teaches you actual real world job skills, followed by a six month paid apprenticeship. And after you complete their program, they contractually guarantee you a $40,000 a year job offer. And if that weren't enticing enough, the net cost of the program to Praxis participants is $0. So that sounds like something that you're interested in. Head over to discoverpraxis.com. On their homepage, they have a button that says Schedule a Call. Click it, Schedule an appointment, and see if it's right for you. So back to the interview, Dr. Harvey Mansfield is the professor of government at Harvard University, where he's been teaching for more than half a century. He's also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He's the author of many books, in addition to many articles, as you can imagine. All right, that's enough for me. Hope you guys like it. So first of all, Dr. Mansfields, I want to thank you for sitting down and taking the time to talk with me today. This is a crazy election cycle. So I appreciate you being here. It's a pleasure. What I'd like to do is get your analysis on this particular election season, just because it's such a crazy election. You've been involved in politics and analyzing politics for many decades now. And then I figured that analysis we can talk, will probably prompt us talking deeper into political philosophy and conservative political philosophy. And I'd like to get your analysis on several issues. So when you see the Trump phenomenon, when I look at it, it strikes me as reactionary, not in a bad sense, just in a descriptive sense, that people are so angered by a lot of the nonsense that's happening in the political world for so long. They're angered by a lot of what they see as a cultural leftism, you might call it. And they have the one guy, Trump, this guy is going to smash the establishment. We're going to take our country back. When you see the Trump phenomenon, do you have the same analysis? Do you think that this ultimately is something that is a reaction to the left, or is it based on sound or principles, you think? All right. I don't think it's based on sound principles. But it is something of a reaction to the left. Certainly Trump made a lot of headway by speaking against political correctness. That impressed me, for example, and many others too. That's a situation in our society, or you might say culture. So I think that the anger you mentioned that's behind him is more cultural than economic, though your culture sense can be activated by, if you lack a job, but still I think it's mostly a dislike of the ways of thinking that are imposed on us. That's political correctness. Political means it's been imposed. And correctness means that's an ironic term. The phrase comes from the Communist Party in the 20s and 30s. They, where it was used, those who follow the party line are in a good sense politically correct. But they also used it in a satirical or ironical sense, meaning referring to people who are overly correct, who go too far. And I think now that it's become totally ironic, it's not a term of praise at all. So politically correct. And it was, I think it's been put by a couple of people pretty well when they say that there's a distinction in our country right now between those who are protected and those who are not protected. And the protected ones are the politically correct and they're protected by political correction. And those will be blacks and women and to some extent Asians, American Indians. Minorities are in the case of women, majority that is oppressed. And the measures of political correctness are intended to address this and to give them privileges which others don't have. So, and you see it also, here's another phrase in affirmative action. Affirmative action is the reserving of good things, jobs or honors to these oppressed minorities. And when you do that, you're adopting affirmative action or the, instead of being vulnerable to oppression as something else besides just deserving. Or you deserve it because you're vulnerable as opposed to those who are not supposed to be and not held to be vulnerable. And those are the ones who are unprotected. So when there's affirmative action, some people are given the benefit of it, which is called being inclusive. But then others are not given the benefit of it, but that's not called being excluded. Nonetheless, it's a zero sum game and you can't prefer some without excluding others. So, and those others who are excluded are excluded so as we can all praise ourselves for being inclusive. So I think this sense of being honored or dishonored, it's more a matter of honor than of gain that comes back to my point that it's not so much economic. So when people are getting fired up by the Trump phenomena, you think this is primarily an unbubbling culture war that people are so fed up with being excluded, maybe even explicitly excluded, that they see an opportunity to finally change that system. They see an opportunity to at least overturn it or to create a little, what they hope will be creative chaos. Now, do you think that there is a connection there between reality? So is it the case that by electing somebody like Adam Trump, these things would change or is this kind of a distraction? If this is a cultural problem, maybe going the political route isn't the way to solve cultural problems. Well, Donald Trump, I think, is a kind of classic demagogue. He's not so much concerned with principles or policies or ideas as with being loved. He wants to be loved by everybody. If you love him, you're a fan of his and then he likes you. And to do this, he's willing to accept the love of anyone, and particularly the most vulgar, to use a very old-fashioned word which applies, I think, to Trump's supporters. But on the other hand, he was able to do this through an institution, the Republican Party, and running for an establishment office, president of the United States, which is a little bit different from the classic demagogue, and was meant by the founders of the people who made our Constitution to get in the way of making things difficult for people like Donald Trump. And so maybe if he loses, we'll see the victory of the Constitution or what's called the establishment at the end. But he's certainly given everything a turn, every one a turn, and cast a shadow makes the whole scene look quite ominous. Yes, so let's play out that scenario. Let's say that Donald Trump loses. This anger is not going to go away. So what do you think that Donald Trump might be the devil that we know and we'll see what comes around next election cycle? Or do you think that this anger is going to, something's got to happen, right, if it's not his election? Well, yeah, it could be a classic case of the purging, a purgation of anger. If you get smacked hard, if he loses substantially, say, gets fewer votes than Mitt Romney, the person he laughed at for being a loser, then I think that's a kick in the stomach. Or for him. But I don't know all his supporters. Well, but right, they will face the declaration that they brought this on themselves and that they let us, we Republicans, into defeat. And what can they answer to that? It's also, the whole situation is an instance of democratic and especially American impatience. Our constitution is designed to make us more patient than we are in our nature. Slow things down. Slow things down by giving lots of people opportunity to interrupt, to make their point with the ultimate goal that the final results of the majority that passes the law will be more moderate than it would have been otherwise. So that's part of it too, just impatience and anger. And the thing about such impatience is that it passes. Or can easily pass. So maybe having brought us to debacle of having to vote for Donald Trump or for Hillary Clinton, we have to look at the other side too, by the way. Exactly, exactly. Let's do that. So when you personally look at those choices, there are other choices. Libertarian, Gary Johnson and Green Party, Jill Stein, those are also choices. For somebody that has been in the conservative movement for a long time, what do you do? Do you hold your nose and vote for Donald or do you say I can't in good conscience? Well, what I'm going to do, I think, I've taken a long time to decide and I've certainly considered voting for Donald. I certainly don't want to vote for Hillary Clinton. But I think I'm going to vote for Mike Pence right in, something like that. That's a protest vote. And by the way, part of this situation too is Bernie Sanders. We have to look at the whole situation includes the Democrats and they had a very near thing of it, almost to get a man who calls himself a socialist and not even a Democrat. And he almost hijacked the Democratic Party the way Trump did the Republican. So let me ask you on that note, a few months ago, when Bernie was still in it and it looked like Trump was going to get the Republican nomination and it was uncertain with Bernie, from my perspective, because I'm very much jaded by politics and now consider myself a libertarian, it seems like almost a condemnation or a demonstration of the fundamental issues in the political system that we have that these two people could potentially an explicit socialist, which is remarkable and disturbing and Donald Trump, which is also remarkable and disturbing. Can that kind of condemn the whole system that such a thing could happen? I think what it condemns is more the situation than the system. The situation is the, I would call it the twilight of the welfare state. That is giving benefits and taxing the people to provide the benefits and asking for their vote on the basis of the benefits. And over the long haul, say, since the 1930s, that has worked pretty well to the advantage of the Democrats and also to the Republicans when they have gone along with the Democrats. But I think that's now coming to an end because I think it's now beginning to be evident that the people are willing to vote themselves benefits that they're not willing to vote payment for. And I think with the doubling of the national debt under Obama, with the continuation of quantitative ease, which can only go on so long, quantitative easing makes the cost of the debt much less than it otherwise would be, makes it really sustainable. But the trouble is that quantitative easing doesn't seem to be sustainable. So the Democrats are very good at finding expedience like this to make things continue. But right now, say, their present campaign is against Trump. It isn't on behalf of further increments to the welfare state. So to be sure, Hillary Clinton has proposed childcare and pre-Kindegarden schooling and so on, and student loans, all these things for their constituencies. But how are you going to pay for those? So I think there is a kind of uneasy sense generally in both parties that this is coming to an end, and that we now face a period of austerity. And this, despite the fact that neither candidate speaks at all of austerity, but mildly. But I think that people are aware of this. And this would be my explanation for the Democrats' affair with Bernie Sanders. They begin to see that welfare state or social democracy is not really viable, certainly not in this country. And it's also too costly in Europe they're having similar difficulties, not to mention the example of Greece where a people that voted excessive benefits to itself through government has come to grief, really. This is coming to be over, and so they wanted to fend the whole system as a whole, and they don't mind calling it socialism, which was always perhaps what the Republicans wanted to call it, and name it correctly rather than politically. So that would be my sense. But then the trouble is you can't, neither party can afford to be the beginner of austerity. And it seems some kind of crisis, some event will have to occur, which forces us as a people to face this difficulty, and I don't know what that will be. That could be in foreign policy, not necessarily in domestic policy, but trouble for the dollar or pensions, entitlements, or financial systems, the stock market. So all these possibilities, but I think we're headed into a queasy situation. So when you see the promises that have resulted in a $20 trillion national debt, you say that you were thinking that some of the democratic, the allure that Bernie Sanders held for them was seeing that maybe this system is not sustainable, that there's something wrong. But when you said that I was thinking, that sounds rude, but that might give them too much credit. And I say that because I see little evidence that people care about economic rationality, that they view the national debt as something that has never been dealt with and therefore never will need to be dealt with. Well there's a lot of that, but I think that's, I'm inclined to adopt a psychological view, which I usually dislike. What do you mean by that? This is kind of an official view that people use to suppress their anxieties, which are closer to the truth. In any case, I was contrasting the situation with the system, the system of the constitutional system with Congress and President and the Supreme Court and so, three powers separated and federalism, I don't think that that is really in question, and I don't think it's the cause of our difficulty. So you don't think that the system has given rise to this situation? No, no, the system has done its best to allay the situation because the system has allowed Republicans to contend with Democrats and to present contrary views and to hold back the welfare state or to bring a consciousness of its inadequacy to the forefront by refusing to pay tax, to increase the necessary taxes. So you might say that's irresponsible of the Republicans, not to raise the taxes, but then they would answer, I think, that if you raise taxes, that'll just allow the Democrats to raise benefits, and they won't pay off the debt, they'll increase it, end up increasing. That's been seen, and so Milkingridge famously said of the previous Republican speaker, he became tax collector for the welfare state. So that has helped that possibility of a split within the divided government has brought the arguments against the welfare state more to people's attention than otherwise would be the case. So when you said a minute ago, this is really interesting, that you think the system has been doing its job essentially because it's been warding off an even worse situation, you might even say. So when you view government now from a more philosophic perspective, do you see Democratic systems in general as essentially doomed? And the purpose of a political system like the U.S. governmental system is precisely to ward off what seems to be inevitable in Democratic systems? Well, I hope not. I think it's part of our responsibility not to believe that. Not to believe that you're doing it. Is that the psychological explanation? No, no, no, I think that, yeah, that's the moral explanation, that there are certain things you mustn't think because it will paralyze you, it will keep you from acting and turn you into an incompetent observer. So yeah, we mustn't think that we're doomed. But it's true, I mean this is a classic failing or end of democracy, the Roman Republic. Same thing happened, the people became dependent on a booty from foreign conquests and stopped working on their own. So that hasn't yet happened and perhaps it won't and we should take measures to prevent it. Still we're headed that way. Do you think that underlying malaise is ultimately cultural and that it is, like you said, people not as hardworking and therefore that you see one manifestation of that in the government? I mean I've been talking so far about the money, the debt of the welfare state but that's the other aspect is moral hazard that being on welfare and it isn't just being poor and being on welfare but being in middle class and getting government benefits saps your sense of self-reliance and makes you dependent on the government and this is happening to more and more people who have dropped out from the workforce, they're not just unemployed, they're not even counted as unemployed, though they're not working. So they've gathered little disabilities for themselves, other ways of not working and enjoying life. So this sort of moral deterioration under the welfare state is really perhaps worse than the economic. But I wouldn't say that this is cultural versus political, it's the two together. I have this more ancient Aristotelian view of government that it rules the country in order to make a certain way of life and that ultimately to spark our liberal principles we live the way we're governed to live. If we live in a pluralist system that's because we have a government that wants that. So it's still the case I think that politics is ultimately responsible for culture. Now I say ultimately because not always immediately, it doesn't mean that say when the republicans come in they can immediately change the country's culture and force it to vote for their measures or to believe in self-reliance instead of government checks. But over time I think it's the case that culture is, at least I will put it this way, is not independent of politics. The way that I view that relationship is very much weighted on the cultural end as politics being kind of an outgrowth of culture. I think it's certainly the case that at the very least politics can negatively affect culture. I would say that very strongly. So what would you say to somebody like myself that views the cultural malaise, the laziness you call it really, and the political debacle and says my analysis is that the system allowed for this, therefore the systems to blame. What I would like to see is a new group of people or maybe the some group of people that have changed their minds that want to be individualistic, self-reliant. That's what I'd like to see and I just don't, if that's what I'd like to see it seems like we need some new type of governmental system. All right, but then that's admitting the power and the necessity of government. You would have to change our education and to change our education you would have to oust the teachers' unions. All this requires political motion and action. Well, what about something like this? It could be political in terms of a description but not necessarily through getting elected and going that route but rather almost anti-political. So one idea that I would love to bring back that unfortunately has a stigma is secession. If it was a secession, oh my gosh, the terrible idea, well, if we get rid of the stigma that's attached to it, it actually makes a great deal of sense that those who want to govern themselves in a particular way can have their structure of government and those who want a complete opposite system of government can have their structure of government. I feel like that idea could really take hold. Well, that's just an extension of the idea of federalism. So we already have states that have quite different governments and different results, the red states versus the blue states, and then each of them is individually different in a way that it's not too hard to see and feel, but on the other hand, what about our national security and foreign policy, don't we need these secessionist states to hang together when it comes to defending our country? My own disposition is to think probably not, but if so, there's nothing that would prevent them from voluntarily colluding. It's not like we need the mandatory oversight of the Washington D.C. system to ward off the people. If the states, let's say, say we had a minimal or non-existent federal government, the states could still associate with one another to try to defend against foreign aggression, and my own libertarianism is much more radical than that. I prefer to see an evaporation of the military, not the services of the military, but the centralization of the military, so I like markets, so I'd like markets to provide for those kind of things. So we have a National Guard in addition to a federal army, and the National Guard is by state, so there's a little bit of flexibility in your direction, I would say, but what you suggest didn't work very well during our Revolutionary War, where we did have a league of states, and it was very hard to get them each individually to pay for the soldiers or even to contribute to the number that they needed, and so at the end of it, the Constitution came out with a fairly strong executive. Yeah, I think it would definitely have been interesting to see what would have happened if we still had the Articles of Kit Federation, I mean that's just one of those counterfactuals that would be really hard to play out, but my disposition is to think the less power that governments have is probably the better, the more power that individuals have, the more they feel like they're in control of their lives, they're responsible for their decisions for better or worse, I feel like that's probably a good thing. Well, that's stated like that, one can agree, that's what I call a free country, but it needs to be free in order to take some decisions altogether too, I think. So yeah, it is good to have this what the Catholics call subsidiarity with sort of semi-independent regions and parts which make a lot of decisions on their own with variability and flexibility and being close to the people and so imposing or seeming to impose less than they do, but still. And then there is such a national culture now with TV and when you turn on the TV, you'll have to find the local news to keep you or to get you interested in what's going on in your city or your community. Yeah, it's even international really, that culture. So the result is a kind of separation between your daily life and the politics that you're confronted with, which is all around the world and certainly in the country. So I know a lot of your work has focused on welfare, on analyzing welfare and the impacts of welfare on politics and on culture. I'd like to ask you a few questions just on that note, because a lot of people will criticize the idea of limited government in any capacity because they say, well, we have to take care of those who can't take care of themselves. And my weak reaction instinctively is to think, well, there's no reason why you have to have a safety net, let's say, provided by a government. You can have all kinds of voluntary community safety nets. How would you answer a question like that? Yeah, I would agree with you on that. I mean, you could have a mix, but still, Republicans tend to favor private charity and church groups and other such groups, which represent people coming together voluntarily to help those who really need the help. Whereas the Democrats don't like generosity as a virtue. They prefer justice. Justice has something compulsory about it, and they're perfectly willing to accept that in return for the universality of it. Generosity, they think, is too much hit or miss. So it might work and it might not. Whereas if you have a government program, that can't miss. At any rate, in principle, it covers everybody and every situation. So you see that very much with the healthcare issue now that the universal is better. And therefore, you kind of lower the motives because justice, when it becomes a law, you can be just merely by obeying the law, and you're forced to. Whereas with generosity, private generosity, you have to step up. And you give yourself a lift while doing that. And the Democrats say, well, that's bad, too. They don't like people puffing themselves up because they have virtues that most people or other people don't have. So you need something. You need a solution which is universal and therefore equal. And the only way you can get equal is to bring more a little bit or more and more coercion into it. So because liberty always produces inequalities. Some people are better at certain things than others. That's what it means to be an individual. It's to be unequal. If you're different from others, then you're better at some things and worse at others. Or maybe better at most things. So liberty leads in the direction of inequality, elites. The cure for elite is elites, the plural. This is very much the American way, I think. And as opposed to most other and certainly most classical democracies, we give a lot of leeway to ambition, which is a kind of passion in each person that makes them want to be outstanding or to excel or to make himself better than the kind of equality which has to be enforced through compulsion. So you have to have a democracy that's more tolerant of inequality than that which insists on everyone's being equal. But everyone's being equal as it seems to be the main idea of a democracy. So it's hard to achieve. As Tocqueville says, a democratic people has a passion for equality and a taste for liberty. So a passion is stronger than a taste. And that's the problem. So when you gave that analysis of how the Democrats view welfare and compulsion, do you think that that is something they would agree with, that way that that is right? Yes, I think they would. I think they would say that justice is better than generosity. So in that... And they do that. They practice that, by the way. There's a book written by Arthur Brooks on the two parties and their ways of generosity. He summed it up in this comparison between the city of San Francisco, which is rich and liberal, and the state of South Dakota, which is much poorer and conservative. And they have about the same population, and South Dakota gives three times the charity that San Francisco gives per year. So that is, I think, a big difference in the parties. So when you... That analysis is in accordance with the experiences and conversations and relationships that I have with people who I think are more disposed towards liberalism, modern liberalism. But if that's true and that's a very popular disposition to have, then doesn't that again kind of condemn, to some extent, the long-run viability of a democratic system? Because I think we also see demonstrated over and over that in the long run, the welfare system is not sustainable. It doesn't work. It's a short-run win and it's a long term disaster. So isn't that distressing? I think that's true. So that's why we're going to have to learn the virtues of austerity. Because choices are a wonderful thing, but one doesn't always have it. And that's a difficulty with libertarianism too, I think, that there are necessities as well as choices. Sometimes you'll have a choice as to how to deal with a necessity, but still you have to do it. And necessity is a kind of compulsion, even if it's not from the government, it's something they were forced, as they say, forced to do. So I'd like to transition a bit to what we're talking about kind of at the beginning about political correctness and also your career. So you have been in academia and higher ed for more than half a century at Harvard, kind of the thick of it all. Do you see the modern trend towards political correctness and the chilling of free speech on campus? Does that distress you as much as somebody like myself, being a young person, knowing a lot of people on campuses, some of the antics that are going on with political correctness are really distressing. And part of the reason I'm doing this series and part of the reason I'm doing my work is because I'm thinking, I don't want to touch that stuff with a ten-foot pole. I don't want to be part of that system. I want to try to avoid it all together. Is this something, is this based on my naivete not being around long enough to see that this is what happens, or is this something genuinely unique to our time? Well, I think it's been building up to this. Since the late 60s, the late 60s is when it got started. The late 60s were very much characterized by antics, as you say, by protest and rebellion and sort of lack of conformity, anti-conformism. So all that was nice and good, but unfortunately those people, once they got into power or into tenured professorships, have produced a kind of soft despotism, again, if I can mention, Tuckfield again, that is endemic in democracy and getting worse and worse in ours. So right now, you don't see anything like the protest of the late 60s. And when I mentioned the way it was since I lived through it to students today, they're open-mouthed. And it's more than hijinks at the disrespect, really, for mind and for thought. You're saying back then? Yeah, back then, yeah. That was shown in these actions and also just disreputable manners, the way people dressed and so on. But now the ideas are there. There's tremendous disrespect for mind in our ideas, but there isn't the rebelliousness that used to go with it. And the reason is that it's worse because there's nothing to rebel against. They were rebelling not against conservatives in the late 60s, but against liberals, against Cold War liberals, against, well, they were the ones who first picked up the word establishment, establishment liberals who were at that time in charge of the universities. And they accused those liberals of being complicit in the Vietnam War and the horrors and injustices of that conflict. So that was what they accomplished. And now it's a new liberalism. The new left has become what are today called liberals. So it's a combination of the old welfare state liberalism with the new relativism and that goes with sort of a weak accommodating foreign policy that's afraid to stand up to bullies. So when you, it's hard to believe for me just based on my own limited experience, I was in school six years ago now, so it wasn't even that recent. But when you see the, I don't know if protest is the right word, but when conservative speakers will come to campus, the students will essentially blockade them and say you can't be here or they'll shout them down, that kind of stuff you think. It was even worse back in the 60s. We've been there seeing that. Yes, it was much more hostile and forcible. For example, the students at Harvard occupied, left SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, occupied University Hall where all the deans, they took those deans and hustled them out of their own offices and stayed there for about three weeks until they were taken out rather forcibly themselves by state police. So that kind of thing hasn't happened. And that's, and the reason it hasn't happened, I wonder, is because they don't need to. These deans, they can bully, they can bully around, they don't need to oust them or kick them out of their offices. So they'll just do what they demand. The deans will do what the students demand without they're having to push them. So I'm at the past several months, I've been trying to overcome my own pessimism about both the state of politics, the state of the culture, the state of higher ed and the intelligentsia. If it's the case that the people in the 60s who were these radicals eventually got the tenure, became the professors, my suspicion is the same thing is going to happen with these students that are going to get the tenure raise up their generation of relativist students. Well, but without changing their views, I mean, because, young, the new left was ushered into the university by the old liberals whom the new left opposed. So out of their liberal toleration, these are young people and the young are wonderful and so we need to support them. But you don't get that view now. So that's what political correctness is. It's the exclusion of conservatives. The place of the old liberals is now being taken on by conservatives. This strikes me as very bleak, though. I mean, do you foresee? It is bleak, in a way. Right. And one keeps looking for signs of hope. It's true that the students who come in are more various, more, as I said, open-minded than either the faculty or the administration. Really? The new students? Yeah, the new students who just arrive here. I mean, they're very soon, their minds are often closed down very quickly, but not all of them. Okay. And so it's still, therefore, it's still worth teaching. And so you can still get young people, intelligent young people, to listen. Yeah. Otherwise, and then who knows what will happen with, as a consequence of the of this kind of chaotic political situation? Or who knows? Maybe I'm wrong about chaotic. Maybe it's just going to be more and more stagnant. It could be the opposite. And bad things will happen gradually rather than noticeably in all at once. It's hard to look forward, at least to the near future, to the foreseeable future with confidence. There is, I think, one bright spot with the Internet, that there's a lot of people like myself, and I think there's a growing movement of the new counterculture is against the relativism, the extreme progressivism on campus. And I think that movement is growing. I think we've hit a point where the pendulum has been so far to the left that people are seeing some of the absurdities, some of the philosophic barrenness of relativism. I hope so. But the Internet has also been used by Trump. That's true. Very effectively. And by ISIS and Putin. And it's used to as a way of bullying and intimidating individuals. The trouble with the Internet is that you're not there with the person that you're talking with. And so you don't feel the same sense of solidarity. It's nice to have somebody who agrees with you. But that's not as good as being with that person. That's true. So you're still very much an individual facing a mass. That, I think, is the main difficulty. And what we need are these intermediate groups. This is, again, what I think libertarianism needs to appreciate more than the need for associations, voluntary associations, that take the edge off compulsion and the edge off universality and the edge off equality and make those three things more livable. I think there's also, it's a smaller amount, but there's also a lot of people who are part of the New Internet culture that see the, they call it trolling, that people just being complete jerks to one another. But I think it develops a kind of, you have to have a certain measure of thick skin that I think is becoming more and more common where people say, yeah, that's just the Internet and therefore doesn't get to people. I mean, if people on the street were talking to you the way that people on the Internet would be talking to you would be horrendous, but we'd just go, that's the Internet. Okay. I'll accept your assurance. Okay. Well, on that note, thanks so much for talking to me. This has been great. My pleasure. Okay. That was my interview with Dr. Harvey Mansfield of Harvard University. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I certainly did. And I really can't wait to do a breakdown of this episode. There were lots of really interesting little nuggets of wisdom, some things, as you can imagine, I disagreed with, but it's great to hear the insight of somebody who's been in the political scene for, like I said, more than twice as long as I've been in existence. All right. That's all for me. I hope you guys have a great day.