 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to our Mises Weekend. So as you can see, we're joined by an old friend, Jim Bovard. I'm sure a lot of you know his name from over the years, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, among other, and of course he's written some great books of his own, but most recently, you'll probably know his name from both The Hill and USA Today, where he is a featured columnist. And Jim, it's good to see you. How you doing? Okay, doing good. Hey, Jeff, thanks for having me back on the program. It's always fun. Well, as our title day indicates, we're talking about this damnable topic, the politicization of America. And I thought you were a perfect guest because you've been in and around Washington, D.C., in and around public policy, in and around the administrative state for so many years. And you know, Jim, these cabinet hearings, they're bringing it home. Obviously Trump has been the culmination of something very ugly in America in a lot of ways, but this Kavanaugh's hearing, this really seems like we've sort of ratcheted it up and there's sort of a new low in how the two teams in tribal America are determined to see this thing, i.e. what Kavanaugh might've done 30 years ago at a teenage party. Yeah, well, it's disappointing to me because I was hoping this process would help restore faith in the government and in the Supreme Court. It doesn't seem to be working out that way. Yeah, I'm sure that was a great hope of yours. Well, it's fascinating how this has become like an onion and we're peeling off layer after layer of BS. And about an hour before this was taped, the lawyers for Ford out in California suddenly announced, well, she's willing to testify, but Monday is arbitrary, unlike the other six days of the week. So, and I want to be clear, we don't know the facts of the matter and if Kavanaugh did sexually assault her and lie about it, that's a horrendous crime. But they haven't given us much to chew on the side from her declaration, which she won't even swear to. So, but you were talking about the tribal warfare of the two parties. What's fascinating to me is how easily this turned into a tribal warfare of the two genders, especially on a lot of the feminists activists are kind of, you know, trying to have a, trying to, are talking and writing as if there is collective guilt by all men because some guys are bastards. A lot of guys have done crap and the bass got in the way with it. Therefore, okay, here's one, let's, you know, let's tar and feather him. Right, and he's also a privileged white guy, went to apparently a prep school in Washington D.C. He went to some Ivy League colleges. So, if he doesn't become Supreme Court justice, boo-hoo, he'll still be okay. This is the kind of thinking that we're stuck with apparently now. Yeah, and I mean, it's been disappointing to me that there wasn't more focus on Kavanaugh being a baseball fan because I thought that was sufficient to disqualify him, but, you know, there's, it's fascinating to see the standards of evidence being used here, especially by the supporters of Christine Ford because all these memes face on Twitter and elsewhere like, I believe her, well, you know, it would help if she knew what year it was. And I mean, it's so basic and maybe, you know, if she was assaulted, I hope that justice can be done, but she's given us so little information and yet there's the sanctimony and the, you know, push-button hatred as, you know, jaw-dropping. But what's odd here or what's unsettling here is that the things we ought to be focusing on as liberty-minded people is that it turns out he's particularly bad on presidential authority. He's particularly bad on the Fourth Amendment. He's particularly bad on surveillance and wiretaps. He's particularly bad on torture. He's particularly bad on FISA court issues. And all of this is almost, this is almost, won't even be considered. It's beyond the scope of the conversation. Well, yeah, I mean, those are grave issues and those are reasons he should not have been nominated. I mean, there was a female judge, Barrett, who would be a lot better and she's more independent and she's untainted. And Trump would have been far smarter to go with her and to make for a much better Supreme Court. It's disappointing that the issues that you raised had no sticking point in D.C. aside from Judge Knapp and about three other people. Maybe a few people in the Hill pissed and moaned about it, but most of the Democrats were attacking Kavanaugh for other reasons and most of the GOP supporters are either cheerleaders or are complicit and the same thing. It's fascinating how the ethics record of the Bush, the George W. Bush administration has gotten a whitewashed. There was a guy, Richard, there's a painter who is a Senate candidate up in Minnesota and he was touting himself as a chief ethics legal officer in the Bush White House. How the hell did that not disqualify him from any appearance in civilized life? I don't know, but you know, the Kavanaugh was apparently tight with John Yu or at least he knew him and had no objections. John Yu should be a poison pill. Yeah, it's absolutely true. And here's the thing is that both sides and I think somewhat fairly so, view the Supreme Court as a life and death matter. You've got these nine monarchs, they're appointed for life and in that sense they have more power than a president. So once we swallow the idea that the Supreme Court makes laws for us, top-down laws, then we're forced to care about Supreme Court whether, because it cares about us. Yeah, Thomas Jefferson had some wonderful lines about he was horrified to see how much power the Supreme Court was capturing early in the nation's history. It's a lot of folks who's been some excellent articles on Mises about how this is indicative of the Supreme Court having too much power. It's also indicative of how the entire government is far too domineering over the American people. And watching the fights back and forth, especially over the last week, it struck me that statism makes people stupid because people are using standards of evidence in this case that few people would use in their daily lives for people who they knew unless they were really angry at their spouse. Right, right. It becomes a sense where the ends justify the means because we're in a war and war has winners and losers, it has spoils. And when you're in a war, you don't much care about whether things are fair or just or comport with a particular process that we'd like to think of as the rule of law. It just becomes win. Yeah, and to take a parallel to that, there was a wonderful line from one of the Godfather movies in which the Godfather devised, never hate your enemies and affects your judgment. And there's so much hatred out there, it's pouring in the streets at this point, it's pouring out in Capitol Hill at this point. And folks don't realize that basically once you start chanting and thrusting your fist in the air, your objectivity is not so good. Well, Murray Rothbard has this great quote from 1970 where he talks about under socialism, all life becomes politicized. And it feels like as America gets more and more statist, more and more collectivist, that this is just a new feature, this is just a new reality to America that we have to look through everything through this lens of race and gender and politics and power and patriarchy and that this is how things are going to be going forward. Well, if that's true, it's gonna get a heck of a lot uglier. And it's already surprising how ugly it's become. People using these lenses, it's just amazing how much the sense of righteousness and the sense of collective guilt on the other side of the barricades. And as I said earlier, there are a lot of guys who are bastards who got away with a lot of bad stuff in the past. And if there's a way to charge them, fine. But this whole notion that a mere accusation not even tied to a year or place is sufficient. It's like, what next? But how is this happening? Why are things so political when if we really look at the two major parties which are now run by neo-conservatives and neoliberals, there's not a lot of difference between them at all in terms of policy and especially not just stated policy but actually enacted laws. I'm not sure that from a purely legislative perspective that the Donald Trump administration is doing things all that differently than a Hillary Clinton administration would do things. We're still in Syria, we're still in Iraq, we're still in Afghanistan, we're still in Yemen. Okay, taxes and regulations might have been cut slightly but other things have increased. They're both bad on monetary policy. So this is overwhelmingly about tone. It's overwhelmingly about tenor and it's overwhelmingly about race and gender and identity as opposed to actual policy differences. So how does this become such a war when there's not a dime's worth of difference at the end of the day? Yeah, some good points you make but to take a couple steps back, I think if Hillary hadn't been elected that instead of having these stupid bases in Syria that we might be actively trying to topple the Assad regime we might have done more aggressive action against Iran, we'd probably have held a lot more conflict with Russia and who knows how that would play out. Trump has done a huge number of stupid and unjust things on foreign policy. We've killed a lot of innocent people brought under his reign. I think that there's an attitude, maybe I'm reaching for straws here but it's healthy to see an open conflict between the White House and some of the most powerful federal agencies like the FBI and CIA. And that might be one of the legacies of Donald Trump. I mean, it's encouraging that Trump is encouraging a lot of people to doubt or question the FBI claims that never would have questioned them before. I don't recall Ronald Reagan doing that and Richard Nixon certainly didn't. So it's not a reason to trust Trump but it's possible that out of some of these war you know, it's a little bit like with the wars of the reformation. Horrendous things, but out of that came more of a space for individuals to live their own lives. Yeah, and I noticed though that while we're busy worrying about talking about a teenage party that Brett Kavanaugh may or may not have attended. You know, in the meantime, Jim, liquid goes on the, so the DOD appropriations bill was just passed by the Senate. It's $675 billion, more the same. It was 93 to seven was the vote. Unfortunately, I see that Rand Paul and Mike Lee voted no on it, but I mean, it's just amazing that while we're preoccupied with this stuff that triggers us emotionally, the actual dark side, the nitty gritty of almost a trillion dollars. Really, when you get into all the state department funding et cetera, beyond just the DOD appropriations but the almost trillion dollars we spend a year on mucking about with the rest of the world goes unquestioned, almost unnoticed. Yeah, it's frustrating. Okay, there's a lot of attention right now on whether or not there was an assault at a party in Montgomery County, Maryland, sometime in the early 1980s. But in the last few weeks, the U.S. has probably been involved in drone strikes that killed a lot of innocent teenagers, male, female, whatever. I mean, there's a lot of carnage which we're unleashing, but it almost never has a human face. And because it doesn't have a human face, people pay attention to the Supreme Court hubbub and the end of the baseball season. Yeah, I know you've been around some of the administrations in Washington over the years. It's interesting if you read Bob Novak, the late Bob Novak, the Prince of Darkness as he used to be called, he really identifies Watergate, the Watergate era is when Washington changed irrevocably. It went from kind of a sleepy backwater where members of both parties and both chambers and the various administrations would kind of get along and have a co between them to something where things started to become politicized and people became suspicious of one another. Now as libertarians, of course, we think the whole thing's a bit of a charade, but it's interesting to me as someone who does have an interest in politics to think of Watergate as a watershed moment. Of course, now we look back on that, Jim, and some operatives breaking into the DNC headquarters to rifle through a filing cabinet. Sounds quaint today. It sounds like nothing. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely to work by what Edward Snowden revealed five years ago. I mean, one of my favorite things that Snowden put out was that the NSA has something called X-key score, which they can target individuals and vacuum up all their email. And it's very flexible as far as what they can target people for. If someone is searching for suspicious stuff on their web, boom, the NSA can vacuum up their email. So if someone's looking at Mises, but I mean, there was some hubbub on this. Snowden got some credit. He deserved to help a lot more. But this is not an issue in DC because the government wins. How do you think we get out of it? In other words, to make society less politicized, less rankerous, we have to make politics matter less, which means we have to reduce the size and scope of the state. The state's been going the other direction. How do we get out of this? How do we ratchet it down? Well, people need to realize that the government is one of their most dangerous enemies. And people still have this blind faith that government is gonna do them good. That's part of the reason for the increased faith in socialism. Folks think that vesting vast arbitrary power in politicians who lied to win office, that these same folks are gonna turn around and do you confer vast benefits on you, aside from canceling your student debt. There is a naivety there. I mean, it's frustrating to me to see the conservatives, see a lot of the GOP clamoring in favor of tariffs and torture at the same time to allow the Democrats are clamoring in favor of censorship and socialism. And it's indicative. I mean, there was only a few years ago we were hearing about the arrival of the libertarian moment. And I'm thinking, I hope you had a stopwatch with a very finely tuned because otherwise you missed it. And I don't think people realize how incredibly bad a lot of these terms of the political debate have turned against people who like freedom. Because again, the torture of tariffs versus censorship and socialism. And either one of those is vesting vast arbitrary power. And, you know, if people haven't learned to distrust politicians by this point, you know, I almost get cynical about their learning curve. But, you know, at the recent institute, we talk a lot about political subsidiarity, about decentralization, about breakaway movements, the session, we get a lot of grief for this. People say, oh, no, no, they want a universal libertarianism, not just in ethics or normative aspects that Rothbard talks about, but a universal political libertarianism. And I look at the landscape and I say, you know, it's just a long way off. It takes 70 million votes to win the US presidency, for example, Ron Paul and Rand Paul, we're getting 2, 3% in some primaries. So, you know, Mises had this great quote, where he basically says, you know, having to belong to a state as a member, as a citizen of which one does not wish to belong is no different if it's a result of an election or an invasion. In other words, a lot of people on the left today, a lot of progressives feel like they are under occupation by the Trump regime, that may seem hysterical, but nonetheless, they feel it, you know, but both sides just want this overarching top-down victory where they control the Supreme Court, they control the House, the Senate, they control the administration and they sort of lord it over the other side, but nobody wants to talk about, what do we do with politically vanquished people? What do we do with that 30 or 40% that has to lose? I mean, even today in the former Soviet Union, there are old people who pine for the communist days, who think it's better. Politically vanquished people don't just go away. So, what do we do with them? I mean, what do the two sides say? Should they die? Should they be killed? Should they be put in camps? I mean, nobody wants to talk about this, but yet, subsidiarity, federalism, secession, is the humane approach to dealing with what seems to be these intractable differences in worldview? Yeah, I think far more of a federal system would be good if people want to secede. Maybe they'll go down into an 1861. There are a number of parts in this country where there's a, you know, massive folks that have a lot more affection for individual liberty than the average American, and those folks should be able to get the breathing room. I mean, I guess part of my, part of the reason I'm not optimistic right now is that there have been so many government outrages in the last, in recent decades. And, you know, it seems as though there was almost a status sea change after 9-11 that so many Americans completely lost their bullshit radar in politics. The government was put on the pedestal for a lot of Americans that's still there. It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter how many butts and boobs of TSA squeezes for no reason. It doesn't matter how many government wiretap schemes are exposed. It doesn't matter how many bogus wars that we helped launch abroad. Iraq, Libya, Syria, you know, there's this faith in the government almost like a supreme protector. So as long as people have that blind faith, it's hard for me to see how any solution is gonna work. But, I mean, it's great y'all are trying, and you know, I'm certainly, you know, plugging away with my articles and stuff, but it's, hopefully things get better. Well, I wanna talk about Barack Obama a little bit too, because we've spoken at length about Donald Trump, but you had an article in USA Today I believe just a week or so ago saying that Obama was no angel when it comes to some of the rifts that we're dealing with now in the post-Obama era. Yeah, well, it's funny to see the media attempting to put a halo back over his head, betray him as a savior. It's almost like we're going back to the campaign poster in 2008, which portrayed him as Jesus. But keep in mind, this is someone who ran on the peace platform in bomb seven nations. This is someone who, as a candidate, was opposed to warrantless wiretaps for illegal, and he expanded the NSA wiretaps, and then he lied about it after it was exposed. This is someone who claimed to have a respect for the Constitution's separation of powers, but when Congress did not count how he relied on bureaucratic bulldozing, as a New York Times said, and these endless executive orders, and his guidance letters on practically everything, I mean, that was just bureaucrats pulling stuff out of the back of their pockets and dictating to America and causing havoc far and wide. And it's interesting to see the myth of Obama because he was not an effective president. He was rolled a lot of different issues. He casts his principles overboard very quickly. He was President Obama helped make America an impunity democracy in which the rulers can do whatever they please. Yeah, so in that sense, there was no hope and change. There was just a continuation of executive authority. Last question for you. You've also written something lately about the sainted John McCain. I wonder how much the foreign policy mentality that he personified the US empire. I wonder how much of that sort of denudes our spirit at home and makes us more accepting of government excesses at home domestically. Yeah, that's a good question. One of the real takeaways from the funeral service of the National Cathedral was... That was about a week's worth of funerals, if I remember. Ha, ha, yeah, there was someone commented online that it only took three days for Jesus to be crucified very advised again. But here we are in the eighth day of John McCain's eulogies and funerals. It was fascinating to see the entire DC, almost the entire DC service and just close ranks and shed bogus tears and all that. But certainly, John McCain unleashed a lot of foreign policy poison. It was encouraging in 2000, the primaries, when George W. Bush, Trance McCain, who was jabbering about his rogue state rollback, which I was pleased to see a lot of Americans realize was this complete idiocy and dangerous nonsense. After 9-11, George Bush adopted that and we've been up Schitt's Creek ever since. Well, Jim, I appreciate you coming on. Ladies and gentlemen, if you're not familiar with Jim Bovard, you need to be. You can find him at jimbovard.com, G-I-M-B-O-V-A-R-D. You can find him in the Hill frequently. You can find him, I wanna say maybe every other week in USA Today and you'll also find him on Twitter, so be sure to follow him and have a great weekend. Thank you, Jim. Subscribe to Mises Weekends via iTunes U, Stitcher and SoundCloud, or listen on mises.org and YouTube.