The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan Talks Freedom and Personal Responsibility with David French

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

Today Ryan talks with author and reporter David French about the balance between personal and civic responsibility, the ability to take criticism, the polarizing battles between the left and right in today’s politics, and more.This episode is brought to you by Mack Weldon, an amazing online retailer for men’s basics. Mack Weldon believes in smart design, premium fabrics and simple shopping—and they’ve created a great new loyalty program, Weldon Blue. Try out Mack Weldon today. And for 20% off your first order, visit http://mackweldon.com and use promo code STOIC.This episode is also brought to you by Leesa, the online mattress company. Each of their mattresses is made to order and shipped for free right to your door. All mattresses come with a 100-night trial and a 10-year warranty, so you can feel confident in your investment in a good night’s sleep. And Leesa's hybrid mattress has been rated the best overall mattress by sites like Business Insider, Wirecutter, and Mattress Advisor. Daily Stoic listeners get 15% off their entire order with the code STOIC. Just visit Leesa.com and get your mattress today.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow David French: Twitter: https://twitter.com/DavidAFrenchThe Dispatch: https://thedispatch.com/people/5849328TIME: https://time.com/author/david-french/Subscribe to David French’s newsletter: https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondering App. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode, The Daily Stoog Podcast. My guest today is actually one of my favorite writers. I try not to read much political news as I've talked about before. I try not to get caught up in partisanship. But I've long been a big fan of David French.

I started reading him when he was at the National Review. We actually wrote a really great email based on one of French's columns. It's about the power of forgiveness, which will link in the show notes. You know, I don't identify with one political party at the moment, certainly not a fan of Trump, certainly not a fan of many sort of democratic policies. But I am a fan of people who think independently, people who think creatively, people who sincerely believe, what they believe and what they talk about. You know, David French is, I think, a smart writer.

What I like about him is that he doesn't just talk about these things. He's also an attorney and an activist. He's a former major in the United States Army Reserve and he served in Operation Iraqi Freedom. And so actually in our conversation, he talks about some of what he learned there serving during the surge, sort of seeing just the true costs of real sort of partisanship and radicalization and this sort of what happens when discourse breaks down. I was particularly fascinated with David's work if only sometimes the enemies that a person makes can be revealing and sort of the loathing that figures on the extreme right have for David French. To me is a sign that he's

probably on to something. There's even sort of an epithet that's now been spread by some sort of particularly radical folks on the right called against David Frenchism. And basically they think French isn't angry enough that he seeks compromise too much that he sticks with principle rather than sort of trying to implement party or specific policy goals, which to me is of course preposterous. And then of course, you know,

the reactive, you know, discuss that people on the left have for him is also illustrative to me that he is someone who maybe has some interesting ideas and things independently. So it was wonderful to be able to talk to him. We had a pretty wide-ranging discussion about a bunch of issues. We don't get into specific policies here there. That's not what Daily Stoke is about. You know, what we wanted to talk about is sort of deeper truths that I think

underlie a lot of our political issues. And we talk about the importance of those sort of forced-to-infurchase of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And we talk about liberty. We talk about fairness under the law. We talk about how one escapes this trap of increasing sort of partisan extremeness, bringsmanship. We talk about that old line from Heraclitus that character is fate. And we talk about just how miserable many people are making

themselves because they are convinced that they have all the answers, that they know what is right. And then finally, we close with something that I've written about as it pertains to Seneca, how one decides to be politically active in times of corruption or dysfunction or incompetence. How does one weigh the opportunity or the obligation to serve their country? You're a diplomat or a bureaucrat or party official. We have an administration that you disagree with, or if that administration is

head by someone that you don't respect or admire, and the tension that one would feel, and if you're a general madist, someone who's studied stoicism, sort of temperamentally the opposite of the president at the moment, but felt obligated to serve, but then also felt obligated to resign at some point. And how does one navigate those difficult decisions? And so David French is a wonderful writer.

I strongly suggest you check out his work. He is the senior editor now at the dispatch, which I get in my email every week. It's a paid newsletter. It's the dispatch.com. You can sign up for it. It's free to sign up and then it costs money to get the better newsletters.

It's got writers, I respect, writing, I admire. I've learned a lot from it, particularly David's weekly email. So check out the dispatch.com. And of course, you can follow David French on all your various social media platforms. We've got links in the show notes. So check it out and thanks again for listening. All right, so David, I am a huge fan of your work. So I have a whole bunch of things I want to talk to you about. But I serve a person when I thought I'd start with have a whole bunch of things I want to talk to you about,

but I serve a person when I thought I'd start with. I'm curious, you know, so Texas has started to open back up a little bit, I know Tennessee is sort of next in the docket. I'm curious how you're thinking about church right now. Are you rushing to go back to that? Or are you, how are you looking at people that are just going through this with someone who's close to me? And I'm just be curious for some of your wisdom.

Well, no question what I want to do is to go back to church, but what's prudent to do, sometimes are desires and our needs are two different things. So, I think one of the clear lessons is that social distancing is an imperative and the businesses that can open and the events that can open that are consistent with social distancing, that's what happens first, but the kinds of mass gatherings that can lead to super spread type events, we need to be

really, really careful about. So does that mean that the instant that a church can open, it should, I think that's a highly individualized determination. Are there ways in which you can open consistent with social distancing? Are there things that you can do, such as holding more services with congregants spaced out more fully. You know, it's a hard call. I think that mass gatherings are going to be the last thing to be safe.

And that's a huge challenge for churches because they are mass gatherings. How do you feel like we got to this place where people, and maybe I'm idealizing the past, but how do you think we got to a place where the should and can, even for sort of good, smart, you know, well-meaning people is such a struggle. Cause yeah, I think that's your distinction is a good one. What someone wants to do, and what someone is legally allowed to do,

to me is a very separate issue as what is one's moral obligation to do or not do, and what is smart to do to me as a very separate issue as what is one's moral obligation to do or not do and what is what is smart to do and not do. Right. I mean, you know, the question is how do we view ourselves as citizens? Do we look first at our responsibilities or do we look first at our rights? And, you know, there is a dynamic set up by the founders and articulated by, you know, the combination of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the great frenemies of the founding. So you have the government obligation, which is to secure the rights that we've been endowed by our creator. So in other words, as the declaration of independence says, we're endowed

by our creator with certain unalienable rights. And then it goes on to say that their governments are instituted among men to secure these rights. And then John Adams writing after the Constitution was enacted, says that our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It's wholly inadequate to the governance of any other. So essentially what this means is the government safeguards

our rights, but we have then a responsibility to exercise our rights for virtuous purposes in an virtuous manner. So what ends up happening, however, is that we often, we get this backwards. Sometimes the government fails to secure our rights and we're rightfully outraged, but sometimes we take the rights that we have and abuse them, and use them irresponsibly and recklessly. And so that sort of harmony, which the government secures your rights, which you as a moral person are devoted

to exercising those rights responsibly, that kind of social compact is getting lost. Yeah, I sort of felt like that was the premise of the Patrick Dean in book, the end or the fall of liberalism. I'm forgetting what it's called, but sort of saying that liberalism is about giving you this freedom, and he doesn't mean political liberalism,

or he means humanistic liberalism. Part and parcel of that is sort of an individual set of standards or governance, whether it's religion or philosophy, like I carry in my pocket a coin, a challenge coin, and it has the sort of four cardinal virtues, which, you know, for the Stoics happened to be the same as the virtues for the Christians of courage and justice and wisdom and temperance, what's weird is that politically we seem to be having very intense, very polarized debates about what should be legal or not, what government should be forcing us or not forcing us to do.

And somewhere along the line, it seems like we've just utterly abandoned the conversation about how individuals should govern themselves as sort of decent human beings. Right, and I think part of the Danine critique is that this rights-based liberalism, as he calls it, actually in many ways, sort of degrades the character of the population, in other words, by having government focus on protecting liberty more so than say the common good as he defines it, then what ends up happening is sort of there's an inevitable decline. I dispute that thesis, I mean particularly if you're focused on thriving religious practice for example and other forms of spiritual practice, this country, the United States of America, in spite of being a rights-based

liberal enterprise since its inception, is still the home of the most thriving religious communities in the developed world. And so, there's nothing that is incompatible between American liberalism, small liberalism, and American virtue. But nothing, no form of government, relieves us from our responsibilities to be virtuous, and no government is very effective over time at enforcing virtue. And the harder it tries,

often the more authoritarian and cruel the government itself gets. Yeah, the Stokes were fond of the dictum from Heraclitus, you know, that character is fate. And I think that that's true for societies, for individuals, and then maybe we can talk about this a little bit, it strikes me that that's sort of politically with the current sort of leadership and administrations

sort of exactly where we found ourselves, that character is the end all be all. And ultimately, more than whether you agree with the right policies or not, sort of who you are, how you can port yourself determines whether you're going to be a good leader or a bad leader, survive crisis or collapse under crisis. Yeah, I think we're relearning the importance of character

in real time. What we're seeing is that our government, which was set up with a series of checks and balances, because the founders understood man's fallen nature and the potential of power to corrupt, still on a sort of a baseline basis depends on a degree of integrity for it to all hang together. No one form of check or balance is foolproof against human corruption. I mean, it can deter it, but it's not foolproof. And few things are effective checks against rank incompetence, which competence is a aspect of character, in my view. And so what we're seeing constantly is if, as we see a degrading trust in institutions,

that if nobody can be trusted to do their job in a professional or a nonpartisan manner, we're talking about key political institutions, if there's an extraordinarily low degree of trust, and it's often earned distrust, then the system starts to fracture, and it starts to fray at the edges. And I think we're seeing that in real time,

and there's sort of this crying need for a hard reboot of character in our system. Yeah, it's a vicious cycle, right? Because if one party, and I, who knows which party started it, right, if one party begins to violate norms, there's a short-term advantage, right? You violate norms, and now you have access to power, you can, you can do things.

But then the other party is faced with a hard choice of do we violate norms in response to this, to level the playing field, or do we get stuck with the prisoners dilemma of sticking with our norms as the other person violates? And I mean, I think this is a lesson, kids learn, this is a lesson that individuals learn, this is a lesson you learn in corporate,

in the corporate world is like, hey, you learn it in sports, you know, it's like the other team can be cheating or of low character or getting away with something. And then the individual is faced with, do I stand for what I stand for, or does it become an arms race? And it strikes me as being very difficult

to get out of this feedback loop once you're in it. Well, it's extremely difficult. So I'll give you two examples, one from the United States, one from abroad. So in the United States here, we're having a huge argument over how is the media, if weather, over whether the media is treating Tara Reed's sexual assault claims against Joe Biden responsibly.

Yeah. And I think that you would look, if you were going to look at the claims that Tara Reed has raised, they've been treated very differently from the way much of the media treated the claims against Brett Kavanaugh, which has led a whole lot of people on the right to say, look at the hypocrisy, look at the double standards. But what is the argument? Is the argument that justice means that Joe Biden should be treated the same way as Brett Kavanaugh, if conservative is believed Brett Kavanaugh was treated unfairly? So do we double the unfairness?

Or is the argument that, okay, why you're treating Biden in a way that's closer to the mark, and so then that should be the pattern for the next one. But then the dynamic is if you give the media a pass here without demanding that they comply the same standards, you're not fighting fire with fire, it's unilateral disarmament, you're giving the other side a pass. And so you get into this situation where the right standard, upholding the right standard and arguing for the right standard becomes almost impossible in many parts of the public because that's seen as disarmament. And to take it a step further, I served in Iraq during the surge.

And one thing I noticed, because we were in a very mixed Sunni Shia area, is that the Sunni and the Shia, and thankfully, were nowhere near the level of vitriol between Republican and Democrat as the Iraqis were, between Sunni and Shia, the height of the Iraqi Civil War. But one thing I noticed, which is I think a very human thing that none of us are immune from, is that the Sunni and Shia leadership, and the Sunni and Shia fighters, the Sunni and Shia fighters weren't necessarily

able to eloquently explain the differences in the Iraqi governance that they would have under Sunni, a Sunni government versus a Shia government, but they could absolutely tell you the last atrocity that was committed against them by the other side. And so the motivation for the ongoing conflict wasn't any longer maybe the underlying theological difference or even the differences over say splitting oil revenue or which region was governed by rich party, et cetera. It was your cousin killed my uncle.

And you see a lot of that dynamic coming online between left and right. Yeah, there are arguments about abortion or there are arguments about gun rights or arguments about health care. Yes, those things happen, but you'll increasingly see, here's why I'm angry. It's about Kavanaugh or it's about Cuffington Catholic or it's and you go and you have these incidents, these, you know these sort of quote unquote atrocities that really motivate your anger

beyond the underlying policy difference. No, I think that's totally right. I was in Istanbul maybe a year and a half ago and you can walk out at the sort of the old racetrack that they had and it's sobering to think that the fall of what was then Constantinople came over the fact that sort of chariot racing was their version of political parties. There was the green team and the blue team. And ultimately, a riot over a, you know, a chariot

match at one point becomes so intense that, you know, the emperor, Justinian, almost is forced to advocate. And the reason I'm telling this story is that I think there's a scenario in which politics just becomes sports, or it just becomes sort of a movie to people, a boxing match. And so people are rooting for different figures, almost a friend of mine compared it to, because I dared mention Michael Flynn in an email earlier this week as an example of someone

who maybe it's not a good idea to chant, lock her up, and then take your own liberties with the law. And I was amazed at how mad people got. And he said, that's because Michael Flynn is in the extended Trump Marvel universe that he's sort of a character now in that series. And so it's like the idea that both sides think they're battling it out when really we

should be insisting as you said on sort of fair even standards of justice or fairness or, you know, equality under the law. Yeah, you took on one of the Trump Avengers and you were Thanos. Yes. No, that's exactly right. I mean, there, I just had, because of some of the recent revelations in Michael Flynn case, people were yesterday,

dredging up articles I wrote in 2018 and trying to tell me I was a disgrace and a traitor and that I should be punished. I'm not quite sure how, but should be punished. Sure. And yeah, so this is people begin to have, I don't know if you were a fan of a sign felled back in the day. Yes. But if you remember the holiday festivus that had the the air, it had the feats of strength and then the airing of the grievances. the air it had the feats of strength and then the airing of the grievances

It's it's it's Twitter is essentially every day as Festivus and everyone's always airing their grievances and You know, it's sort of easy to write off Twitter and sort of say well, yeah, that's a Twitter bubble and to extent That's true most most people don't really pay attention to Twitter to be honest But the the thing that is particularly toxic about it, especially when it comes to politics, is that basically everyone who really is a player in politics in the media isn't just on Twitter, but they're on Twitter almost obsessively. And so what that means is that that discourse, as bubbled off and cocooned off as it is, has a real outsized influence on actual policy makers and actual media figures in the United States. So it's almost like the small rudder of a very large ship.

And that is deeply disturbing to me. And I'm hoping that more and more people realize it, while Twitter has its uses, one of its uses should not be to determine sort of the national mood or to set national policy. No, I think that's totally right. Whenever I do pull up the Twitter feed, I made the decision about two years ago to take it completely off of my phone. And whenever I do find myself in the feed, I can actually kind of feel my pulse click quickly and I can feel sort of my heart tighten. And it strikes me that I was curious, you know, because you were the sort of the center of some

controversy about this on the right, not too long ago, that this sort of enmity and anger and radicalization on both sides, one of the weird things that I see the similarity in it is that both, whether you're on the extreme left or the extreme right, the sort of the woke left or the alt right, it strikes me as both these archetypes seem very miserable and unhappy to me, and it seems largely self-inflicted. Oh, yeah, there's an enormous amount of misery, just an absolutely enormous amount of misery out there. And the other thing that's very strange is that a lot of folks believe their tweeting is somehow in

indicia of toughness. That that angrier you tweet, the more insulting you tweet, the more relentlessly you tweet, it's sort of that scene is kind of that's what fighting is. That's what being tough is. And if you're kind to other people, that's seen as weakness. That if your tweets aren't mean enough, that means you're weak or if you're open to ideas or open to argument from people on the other side of the aisle, that's also seen as weakness. Now, when you really break it down, when you really break it down,

the idea that someone who's on the opposite side of you, ideologically has nothing to offer to you at all, is a little strange and bizarre, and it sort of presumes for yourself an enormous amount of intellectual knowledge and wisdom that no human being really possesses. We need to be open to critique, to check ourselves, right? But what they're really saying isn't necessarily that these people have zero perception of the truth at all. What they're really saying is, those people are so evil,

they should not be dealt with at all. That they're evil, that they hate you, that they hate our way of life. You know, we've seen this get sort of increasingly deranged in the course of the coronavirus outbreak to where their voices have seen them mainly on the right who are saying that the closing down, social distancing, closing down of the economy wasn't justified at all.

It was just a completely cynical effort to tank the economy and throw people out of work to weaken Trump's re-election chances, which is an extraordinarily crazy thing to say when you have 60,000 deaths in a month, you've had hundreds of thousands of deaths across the world, you have spiking all-cause mortality death in state after state in the US, and where people were so intimidated by this virus, rightfully so, that they were already changing their behavior before the lockdown orders.

Okay. Obviously, the thing you were in the center of, which they've now called David Frenchism, the flashpoint was the transgender story time at public libraries, which also strikes me as such an absurd thing. Because I feel like there's a very reasonable take on this, which is that both sides are right, in the sense of like, where kids actually clamoring for a transgender reading, or is this like a weird parental thing trying to sort of shoehorn in political and social activism into kids,

which to me is like very insidious form of like children's books I don't really like and always seems very pandering to me. And then on the other hand, you know, if people want to do what they want to do, they should be allowed to do it. I have so much, yeah, I just have so much trouble wrapping my head around why this is making people so angry. And then conversely why someone like you who sort of taking an even-killed approach, looking at it, looking at what the law says, looking at what our obligations say,

looking at what the intention of the founders, looking at how the system is served as pretty well so far and trying to continue that, that to me seems like sort of wisdom in virtue embodied. How did we get so crazy that you're the bad guy? Well, you know, there's, what, who is it that said, was it the Linsky, I can't remember,

is it all politics is personal or that there is a, invariably personal aspect of politics, is probably not a Linsky, it's a phrase I've heard many times. And one of the ways though to try to discredit a movement is to try to discredit a person and and so that's how politics gets personalized and for whatever reason for a few brief months and in 2019 I became sort of seen as the I was fixed as sort of the personification of a kind of politics that a lot of folks on the right don't like. And so that meant two things. One, not only that my ideas had to be destroyed, but then in a real way, I had to be destroyed.

And so that's what I dealt with for a week after week after week, and the instigating event was something I didn't even know occurred. It was a drag queen story, or a library in Sacramento, California. And what you said is exactly right. I mean, what you've got is a very small number of pretty radically, politically radical parents who want to expose their kids to this drag queen story hour stuff. And nobody has to go.

Nobody's required to go. Very few people go. I think there's only about 35 chapters of this thing in the entire United States. So that means about what? One chapter for every 9 million people. And for this, a lot of people said, well, we need to rethink the whole first amendment doctrine that grants sort of equal rights to free speech and equal access rights to public facilities, and spite of the fact that while there are only 35 drag queen stories at ours, there are thousands of churches and tens of thousands of Bible study groups and tens of thousands of political groups and philosophical societies and you name it that take advantage of these doctrines to use public facilities that they have paid taxes to support. And it was this incredible sort of political argument that said, well,

that's not a problem because I'm going to gain enough political power that all of the people who I like to see speak, I can protect their speech and the people whose speech I find destructive, I can censor it. And it's just a really remarkable, it's remarkably unrealistic for one thing to think that you can seize that level of power and maintain it. And the other thing is it's fundamentally authoritarian. And it's fundamentally opposed to the American founding.

And so I found myself for several months. And the really odd position of having to sort of defend my public reputation and defend my life's work. At the same time, I was also defending the American founding. It was truly, I got to tell you Ryan, it was bizarre. It is bizarre because there's sort of this, I'm someone who I would sort of describe myself more as a centrist. I think I'm centred right on some issues center left on issues

weirdly from from my readers that sometimes get you know labeled as being some flaming liberal even though I live on a ranch in in Texas I've never never quite got but what's interesting to me is the sort of straw man that like you know Liberals are always on the right side of history because they're about change and progress and conservatives are always on the wrong side of history and you can look at certain issues and paint this picture. But it's like, you know, part of the reason that it's hard to do stuff in the American system and why why the founders did make it, you know, that it's easy to pass things through the the the house and it's hard to pass things through the Senate and why easy to pass things through the house and it's hard to pass things through the Senate and why, why, why sometimes at moments like this, it feels so hopeless that our system is so gridlocked. It's like people have trouble realizing, oh, these are actually protections

against our own impulses because we, when we are caught up in passion or anger or rage or a trend of a moment, we often can and historically have done really stupid reckless things. Yes, sometimes what we're trying to jam through is civil rights or getting closer to what the founders intended, but a lot of times what we're trying to ram through is, yeah, shutting down a drag-creen story hour or shutting down the right of one religious

group to do X or Y or Z. And I think people have trouble remembering that it's this way on purpose. Yeah, that's very well said. I mean, the entire Bill of Rights is a firewall against majoritarian tyranny. I mean, the founders were deeply concerned about majoritarian tyranny. That's why we have a bill of rights is to carve out these fundamental, unalienable rights that even if you are in a permanent minority politically, you should be able to lean on to protect your citizenship

in the United States of America and your right, fundamental rights as a citizen. And I'd note that many times, I would say almost every time, everything that you look back America and your right, fundamental rights as a citizen. And I'd note that many times, I would say almost every time, everything that you look back on and you say, wow, we as Americans really failed to fulfill the promise of our founding, beginning with slavery,

continuing on into any number of other areas where there were oppressed or marginalized populations in this country. What you saw was for each of those groups, there was a violation of the social compact by a systematic denial of availability of the rights in the Bill of Rights. I mean, slaves had zero. You know, they had no rights under the Bill of Rights. You had other populations where their rights were somewhat protected more than others.

I mean, as recently as World War II, we interned an entire population of American citizens, Japanese Americans, without any evidence of wrongdoing. I mean, it really is stunning. Never mind. And that doesn't even include that for 20 years after World War II, you had systematic digiura racial segregation. And those things were fundamental violations of that social compact, fundamental restrictions of access to the Bill of Rights. And that's why I'm particularly sensitive to any argument that says, well, here's this or that population of Americans, radical or not radical, that I despise so much that I'm going to violate the social

compact to restrict them. And because that's never worked out well in the history of this country. No, I think that's well said. And one of the things I've been thinking about with my young kids and sometimes I'm trying to write about is I think we do a bad job telling the story of American history like. I think a lot of people are under the impression that we waged the Civil War, we didn't really care about slaves, and then we sort of abandoned black people immediately after. What I thought Ron Chernow did quite well in his biography of Grant, he spends, you know, a couple hundred pages on reconstruction. And I think he really paints just how valiant the effort was on waged by the Republican Party at that time to try to enforce the 13th, 14th, and 15 amendments to try to get people there rights.

And that it's like they couldn't, you're right, that someone was violating the social compact and all the well intentioned efforts couldn't quite get there. The wave crashed before it got over the wall. And then I think we need to look at history as a struggle to get where we're trying to get sometimes we get there sooner than expected. A lot of times it's unfortunately quite late, but it's also true that when we did fail, all the times when we did get it wrong in American history,

there was also a very large percent of the population who was trying to get it right. And I think it's who are we going to choose to hold up as our heroes? Well, I think one of the enduring contributions of the founders was in spite of their own flaws, and in spite of the fact that the founding generation preserved slavery is that they set up

a political system motivated by a political ideology that had irreconcilable tensions with existing oppressive structures. So you created this tension between the ideals of the founding and slavery. You created this tension between the ideals of the founding and any number of other injustices that existed then or later. And so what ended up happening is when you create this tension at some point, something's got to give, right? And time and time again, over the course of history, what has given way is the oppression, sometimes way too late,

sometimes after an enormous amount of pain and bloodshed. But what has given way is that is the oppression by setting up that tension from the beginning. And a lot of founders knew that there was a tension there between the ideals and the reality. But setting up that tension from the beginning put the thumb on the scales towards liberty in a way that has borne fruit for more than two centuries. No, that's well said. So one last question for you. I realize this is a big one, but you can take as big or as small a swing at it as you like. I wrote a piece for the Times in 2017.

I think I'd been offered a job in the Trump administration. I don't think they'd fully vetted me or they wouldn't have offered the job. But I'm fascinated by it because the Stoics have this rich history. You know, Seneca serves in Nero's regime, Octavian, the first emperor of Rome has two Stoic philosophy teachers. So the Stoics had sort of always been on the side of the Republic, and then they kind of found themselves unfortunately in order to survive in the structure that came next and to try to sort of

minimize harm as much as possible, working inside a corrupt or broken system. I'm curious as someone who's been identified with being opposed to Trump, but then obviously, you know, you would have been quite happy if any number of the other Republican candidates had won. How do you think about this sort of temptation

or the balance of like one's personal ambition? Someone who wanted to be secretary of state their whole life or someone who wanted to be White House secretary their whole life. Someone who has very clear policy agendas and goals that now is a moment to implement and then having to either collaborate with or turn a blind eye to, you know, things that they

disagree with or serve a president they disagree with. I think we're seeing now on the sort of COVID task force. There's a number of doctors and government officials who probably would rather have any job than the one they have at the moment, but they're sort of showing up every day and trying to do the best job possible. I just curious, how do you think about that balance or tension? Because I imagine you know quite a few people who are experiencing it themselves. Yeah, I've talked to a lot of folks who have asked my advice on whether or not they should join the administration. And I've basically said the same thing every time. One is we need good people there.

I mean, we need, as you were exactly right to bring up the coronavirus challenge, think about our situation. If we did not have people with the level of confidence of Dr. Fauci or Dr. Berks, for example, a terrible situation would be that much worse. So we have to have good people working in the federal government. We need them. It's an imperative, and arguably it's even more a imperative when the chief executive himself

has serious problem, ethical problem, serious competence problem, serious honesty problems. I mean, you name it. And so we need to have good people, but at the same time, you have to hold it lightly. In other words, you name it. And so we need to have good people. But at the same time, you have to hold it lightly. In other words, you cannot become with all of the good intentions of doing good. You cannot become an instrument of incompetence. You cannot become an instrument of dishonesty. So you have, I think that somebody should enter into service with eyes open and

recognize that there may come a time sooner rather than later where they have to resign. Now what the human temptation that kicks in is that we often view ourselves as sort of more important and indispensable than we really are. And so you end up swallowing things or complying with things that you had never swallowed or complied with before for the greater good that you think that you and you alone can accomplish. And that's how people kind of get sucked in to become assimilated into the Borg, so to speak, is that they begin to view themselves as more indispensable than they really are,

as more important than they really are. And so therefore, they will do things they never thought they would do to keep that seat at the table. And I think that there are some people who are just pure Machiavellian. Yeah, I want to see the table because of fame, riches, et cetera, et cetera. But I think most people in politics that I've encountered who've engaged in a pile of compromises that they would have never wanted to engage in, if you talked to them about it beforehand, have genuinely convinced themselves that they

have an end, they have an important place for the good of the Republic, and that it will actually hurt the country if they're not there. And that's a dangerous way to think. Yeah, no, it's, there's so, we do not live in a time of easy, clear-cut things. And I think ego is tied up in that moral obligation, is tied up in that. And yeah, just human temptation. And whatever you think of James Comey, I think he wrote an interesting piece where he was talking about,

you walk into the president's office to talk to him about some dire security threat. And he's talking to you about the size of his inauguration crowd. And the second you accept that to talk about what you want to talk about, you're compromised. And I think we are watching in real time, you know, the things that would we typically only see in a Shakespeare play or the pages of Plutarch or, you know, we think this, we think we're past these moments in history, but you know, unfortunately we're in one right

now. And I think the one we should all be trying to learn lessons from that, I guess, is my point. Well said. Well, thank you so much, David. I'm a huge fan of your work. I love your, the dispatch paid newsletter. Obviously, Deway Stoke, we're big on paid newsletters too. So big fan of it. And I appreciate all the work you do. You've opened my mind to many different things and thank you for taking the time. Well, thank you very much for having me. I deeply appreciate it. If you're liking this podcast,

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