“What we have now is the wholesale capture of intellectual life in the United States. It began with the academies and now the graduates from these academies are going to work in publishing houses, for example, and they are churning out books that look and feel and sound exactly like their neo-Marxist professors. It's no wonder that the culture is being flooded with exactly that kind of toxic ideology.”
~ Joel Bowman, author of Morris, Alive
TRANSCRIPT
Joel Bowman:
Welcome to the Bonner Private Research podcast. I'm your host, Joel Bowman. Each week we bring you exclusive conversations with members of Bill Bonner's Private Research team, as well as some special guests we'll meet along the way. We're trying to connect the dots from high finance to lowly politics, private investments to public follies, from Wall Street to Main Street, at home and on the road. We're into sound money, personal freedom, classical books, and great wines, not always in that order. So join me and the rest of the Bonner Private Research team as we pack our bags and follow the money.
Joel Bowman:
This week's installment of the Bonner Private Research podcast comes by way of the Wiggin Sessions. A few days ago, I sat down with my friend and bestselling author, Addison Wiggin, or rather we Zoomed from opposite ends of the Americas, to discuss neo-Wilsonian progressivism, the trouble with creeping Marxist ideology, how literature became captured by the woke mob, and what, if anything, we can do to resurrect and protect the idea of America. Please enjoy my conversation with Addison Wiggin up next.
Addison Wiggin:
Welcome to the Wiggin Sessions. I'm here with my good friend, Joel Bowman, who I believe is in Buenos Aires.
Joel Bowman:
Correct, present.
Addison Wiggin:
Yep. And we're going to talk about some interesting things that are outside of our normal economic discussion, but I think we'll probably get into that as well. But Joel, I wanted to tell you something.
Joel Bowman:
Please do. First of all, thank you for having me on.
Addison Wiggin:
Wait. Hold on. We've been doing this Wiggin Sessions since the beginning of the pandemic, and you are episode 69. So this is the question I wanted to ask you. Does that mean anything to a globetrotting Aussie? Episode 69, come on.
Joel Bowman:
As in some kind of salacious innuendo that I ought to insert here?
Addison Wiggin:
Yeah, you can say whatever you want. I'm just saying it is what it is.
Joel Bowman:
Well, I think I was also on episode 40 something or 50 something. I don't know if we have to add those numbers together, if it comes up to something else. Some other numerological-
Addison Wiggin:
Yeah, we could probably do that too. All right. So we were just talking about Omicron, and I just wrote this in our daily email, that people are learning new letters from the Greek alphabet because of a disease.
Joel Bowman:
Yeah. It's not the ideal way to be introduced to the classics, is it? But I note that we missed letters, Nu and Xi, and I think that's kind of interesting.
Addison Wiggin:
No, we actually didn't miss them. They just didn't get ... like Omicron just sounds like a transformer giant that's coming to kill us.
Joel Bowman:
We skipped them, yeah. I think we skipped by them because Nu had the obvious novel connotation. And then I think people were speculating on whether we missed Xi because of some trepidation with regards to the leader of the Chinese Communist Party or ...
Addison Wiggin:
Well let's get into this. We had an interesting conversation before we started talking today about a novel that you wrote. And it's connection with a theme that we've been talking about for years which is the "Idea of America." So let's get started. The title of your novel is Morris, Alive.
Joel Bowman:
Yes. Indeed.
Addison Wiggin:
I think we got it. I have my copy, it's in the other room.
Joel Bowman:
Very good. I have it here.
Addison Wiggin:
I should have been on the spot and brought it with me.
Joel Bowman:
I have it here, hard copy in hand. None of this digital simulacrum; that's not the real thing.
Addison Wiggin:
Yeah.
Joel Bowman:
But yeah, it's-
Addison Wiggin:
I like the premise of the story. It's semi-autobiographical. I guess it's probably ad-libbed a little bit. But it's an Aussie's perspective on moving to the United States.
Joel Bowman:
Yeah, broadly speaking, I mean-
Addison Wiggin:
And what you expected to find.
Joel Bowman:
Right, right. I mean I live in a building here in Argentina that the great Argentine essayist and literary critic Jorge Luis Borges called a labyrinth to confuse men. But Borges also observed that all fiction in the end is autobiographical. So in that sense, it is kind of my own story in a way or at least the experiences that I've had filtered into the narrative. But you're completely right when you say that it's an outsider's perspective on the idea of America.
Joel Bowman:
And part of the reason that I thought that that might be novel or interesting to readers was because, as you know and as you've pointed out on this episode and elsewhere, it's become incredibly fashionable of late, particularly among the learned, chattering class and those in the academies to sledge America. And to take on the top dog. It's seen as some, especially over the last couple of years, it's often seen as some irredeemable stain on the pages of history. From the very outset, the founding is now ... The date of the founding is up for “debate.” What went into the founding documents is scrutinized and it's very difficult oftentimes if you're within a particular cultural malaise - and the book here is set at the beginning of the 21st century - if you're in a particular cultural malaise, which is to say if you are a United States citizen, it's sometimes difficult to step outside of that vantage point and get an outsider's perspective.
Joel Bowman:
And so I was fortunate enough to immigrate to the United States in ... I think right around early 2000 or 2001. And I immediately saw ... I come from Australia, your listeners can probably hear my accent. But we might look a bit like Americans and talk a bit like Americans and we have the same TV and Western Culture and are largely influenced by American music and television and movies and whatnot. But I recognized pretty quickly what Freud called the narcissism of small differences. And that is to say that there is a huge gaping difference between the founding principles of the United States and those of Australia, the population of which still rightly refer to themselves as subjects since they haven't had their own revolutionary war yet. Where Americans very proudly consider themselves citizens.
Joel Bowman:
So there's a lot of very, very fundamental differences between the United States and countries abroad. And so I wanted to just bring an outsider's perspective to that argument, to that debate, and see if there was anything worth offering.
Addison Wiggin:
Yeah. So why don't you, just for the context of it, why don't you walk us through the narrative of the story? So you arrive and you kind of-
Joel Bowman:
Right. Well so the-
Addison Wiggin:
I know your story probably just about as well as you do but it would be best if you said it.
Joel Bowman:
So the protagonist, the eponymous Morris, he follows his heart across the pond as a hopeless, Keats-quoting romantic and part-time bar room philosopher. Lands himself in the United States and pretty soon embarks on I would say a pretty classic American coming of age type story. A classic bildungsroman narrative structure.
Joel Bowman:
So there's a coast-to-coast ... I don't want to give too much away here. But there's a coast-to-coast road trip. There's lots of homages to the great American writers. You know H.L. Mencken, Lysander Spooner, Henry David Thoreau. Writers who I was reading at the time and who meant a lot to me. America has, as you know, a long and storied history when it comes to subversive writers and writers who challenged their government, their status quo. And I think that we might be, particularly in the realm of fiction, we might be in danger of losing that as everything becomes homogenized in the world of literature at the moment.
Joel Bowman:
But anyway, so Morris goes on his journey which takes him from sea to shining sea. And by the time he ends up at his final destination, he has met a colorful cast of Americans both over the phone and in little Anytowns across the 50 states. Places in the rustbelt, the prairies, the Rockies, what have you. And he's gotten to know a little bit more about America and hopefully a little bit more about himself along the way.
Addison Wiggin:
But there is also an economic narrative as well because part of the idea of America wraps up in the idea that you can recreate yourself, you can be innovative or entrepreneurial and find a home in some way. But that gets lost along the way, it seems like.
Joel Bowman:
Yeah. It's no coincidence I think that a great many of the towering giants of American letters have chosen for their theme either geographical or intellectual frontiersmanship. And this kind of pioneering mentality. And you go back and think about how, I just mentioned, Spooner and Thoreau. But it runs through literary fiction as well. From early 20th century, you think back to Hemingway or the whole lost generation. I mean it was Gertrude Stein to whom's bosom all of the lost American generation fled.
Joel Bowman:
You'll notice of course that none of them lost anything of their Americanness when they went there. I mean they were abroad but they were more American than ever.
Addison Wiggin:
I was thinking of Walt Whitman and if you move forward to like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, there's a theme of this lost soul-searching.
Joel Bowman:
Yeah.
Addison Wiggin:
Like they don't really fit anywhere but the continent is wide and large and they go around meeting different people. And then we have some of our greatest poets and song-writers that come out of that same theme. So what is it to you that's unique? That's kind of my question about looking at it from an Australian perspective, what is unique about that that's different than say trying to figure out how to live in Australia after you got sent there because you committed some crime in London?
Joel Bowman:
I'll just preface this by saying you mentioned Walt Whitman. I took a few lines of his poetry for at the very beginning of the book here. And I'll read them out. It's, "Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me. The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose."
Joel Bowman:
And I chose that particular passage because for me, the United States embodies this idea of choice and self-determination like frankly no other experiment in governance or national mythology or whatever you want to call it has before or since. And it's really caught up in the essence of the founding documents. And people like to denigrate that now and like to presume from their perch here that they could do without such rights as are enumerated in the First Amendment to the Constitution, for example. That being the right to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and in particular, to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. But you don't need a particularly colorful imagination to envision what happens when you don't have those kind of founding principles.
Joel Bowman:
And so you mentioned what might be different in Australia. Well you only need to take a look at what's happening on the ground of my country of birth at present where the Army is on the streets in Melbourne and Victoria. They have built permanent camps in Howard Springs, in the northern territory where the Australian defense forces, the euphemistically named Australian defense forces, are now rounding people up and taking them against their will. There's no such thing as freedom of speech in Australia. We like to think in these weird countries, which is to say Western educated, industrialized, rich and developed countries, we like to think that we have all of these rights as they're laid out in the founding documents. But we get those mostly vicariously. We get those through watching cop shows that are produced in the United States and just assuming that we have those, too.
Joel Bowman:
But in countries around the world, and you can have a look in Germany or Austria, for example, in the United Kingdom. What's happening in Europe with regards to ... I know we're going to talk about vaccines and traveling and mandates and all of that kind of stuff. But there's a real independent streak in the genetics of the American dream. And I just don't find that elsewhere and I don't think ... I think it's taken for granted. And the grand irony is that it's taken for granted and denigrated by largely a hysterical clutch of the most privileged people on the planet that are whining from Ivy League perches about what a misogynistic, racist, irredeemable country they live in. When they live in not only, arguably, one of the freest countries on the planet now but maybe ever.
Addison Wiggin:
So do you think then that that lack of understanding is threatening the idea of America the way that you have come to see it yourself?
Joel Bowman:
Yeah. I mean I don't think you have to look very hard across the landscape today whether it's the abysmal betrayal of its duty that the forth estate has perpetrated by way of holding out false narratives. Or whether it's the encroachment of progressives into wanting to tear down the checks and balances that hold the separate powers of government apart. There are many, many movements afoot right now. I know we spoke last time on this program about the attack on the Western Canon and cancel culture. These are all different front lines on the same basic battlefield.
Joel Bowman:
But what I'm weary of is, I could understand in some way people who had never enjoyed these freedoms not valuing them in the way that they should. But we're talking now about people who are essentially ingrates. I mean they grew up with these freedoms and maybe that's why they don't imbue them with nearly the value that they ought to.
Addison Wiggin:
Yeah. I mean the obvious question there is what do we do about it? How do we make sure that people understand it? We have a lot of these debates about the education system being indoctrination but not education. We're not training people to be free thinkers and independent within the economy. We're not training people to do that anymore. We're training them to follow these narratives you and I would not agree with. But that's a really long way to get to the question, what can we do about it? I guess you write a novel and hope that people read it.
Joel Bowman:
Yeah, I mean it shows-
Addison Wiggin:
...where we talk about it and we're like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's hard. I mean one of the questions that I've been asking is how does somebody like Dr. Fauci have so much authority on popular media where no one even questions it anymore?
Joel Bowman:
Yeah.
Addison Wiggin:
So I find that dangerous. So let's just put that aside. Your perspective as you move into American culture and then out of it, and then back into it, and then out of it. What is it that is driving people to ... I know that you're calling them ingrates but what's the impulse there? I don't understand...
Joel Bowman:
I don't think it's by accident. Yeah. It's not accidental. I know you've written before extensively, both in your newsletters and in books that you've authored and co-authored with Bill Bonner for example, about Gramsci's long march through the academies to take just one example. But what we have now is the wholesale capture of intellectual life in the United States. It's beginning with the academies and now the graduates from these academies are going to work in publishing houses, for example, and they are churning out books that look and feel and sound exactly like their neo-Marxist professors. And so it's any wonder that the culture is being flooded with exactly that kind of toxic ideology.
Joel Bowman:
When I look at people in their ... Not to sound like a curmudgeonly old geyser here, but when I look at people who are newly graduated from universities who aren't as flexible in the workforce as they want to be because they've taken on a lot of debt or ... And they've been sitting in lecture halls listening to or rather being indoctrinated to for the past four years, it's not difficult to understand why they would come out and just see this as par for the course. And again, part of the reason of me wanting to write a work of literary fiction is because I think by and large, the newsletter industry in large thanks to yourself and others, and the alternative media just in general, is fairly well-studded with independent thinkers just by nature of their being alternative to the mainstream. And so we have a lot of firepower there.
Joel Bowman:
But when it comes to the arts and in particular, to literary fiction, there's just no game. I mean it's completely owned if you look at Amazon bestseller lists or Oprah's Book Clubs or whatever, it's completely owned by people who are avowed Marxists. And who have a very particular agenda, a very particular worldview. And are not shy at all in pushing that. And so I think it potentially has an outsized impact if we stake a bit of a claim there and say actually, not one step further. And I might just be a tiny little rusty needle in a hay field but it has to be a start.
Joel Bowman:
In the second half of the 20th century, we had no shortage of American writers who would have been appalled at what passes for contemporary literature. And I'm talking of giants like Saul Bellow, for example, who I elude to pretty extensively in the book. Updike as well and Phillip Roth. The list goes on and on. Bellow is a man who won three national book awards, a Pulitzer Prize, a Nobel Prize in literature. I think the most decorated man of American letters in the second half of the century. And yet, he's all but scrubbed from contemporary English literature 101 courses at universities. Where instead of studying the Western Canon, not to just mention just the Americans in the Western Canon, they're unpacking the cultural significance of Cardi B's lyrics or some other absolute nonsensical waste of time. And they're doing that in place of, or in lieu of Shakespeare and Goethe and Cervantes and all these other dead white men that they'll never read and in front of whom they have precious little humility.
Joel Bowman:
So I think, yeah, it has to-
Addison Wiggin:
I'm going to ask you, I'm going to throw a bomb into your particular narrative at this moment.
Joel Bowman:
How anarchistic of you.
Addison Wiggin:
Yeah. What's wrong with Marxism?
Joel Bowman:
How long is this program? How long do I have?
Addison Wiggin:
I'll give you five minutes?
Joel Bowman:
Yeah. Well-
Addison Wiggin:
What's wrong with it? Why do we hate it so much?
Joel Bowman:
To boil it down, I think that the primary beef I would have with it, you hear a lot of people say, "Well it's great in theory but it just doesn't work in practice." I don't agree with that. But even that says, "Well it's great on paper but we just didn't take into account human beings." Which when you're coming up with a theory, a sociological or economic theory and you don't take into account human beings, or you treat them as superfluous, which is essentially the way that they were seen, their interactions to be commodified. Then you're missing, I think, a fairly essential part of the entire project and that's individuals along the way. Again, to get back to the cornerstone of the American experiment. It's the individual that matters, not the collective.
Joel Bowman:
And when we talk about Marxism, particularly neo-Marxists, that is to say the kind of post-modernist Marxist theory that is emanating from American academies and academies across the west at the moment, what we're talking about is essentially a worldview that posits hierarchical power structures at the center of everything. And seeks to divide people up into classes in this zero sum interaction, the logical end-game of which is displacement and war between the classes. And if you read something, your listeners are, I'm sure, very well-versed in this, but the Communist Manifesto is a 60-page pamphlet which calls for violent overthrow. And if you see the world through this warped prism where everything that somebody else has is because they're first of all denied it to you, and where we live in this non-cooperative zero sum world where everything is a power struggle and we all exist on these hierarchies, then it's very plain to see why people aren't interested in open debate and discussion. Because for them, it's not about discussion or compromise. It's not about the market. It's not about free exchange. It's about dominance and power. And I think that's to be resisted at all costs. If only, because we know where it ends and the history books are pretty clear on that.
Addison Wiggin:
I was putting the same idea in context of the Hegelian Dialectic which is every idea that has driven western society, mostly, leads to the next idea. And Marx was a capitalist who critiqued the capital system. And if you can't get out of that dialectic, if you can't get out of the idea that it's all about material goods and who has what, then you're stuck. You're stuck with the conflict. And that's what I think is happening. I think I'm only just trying to add to what you were saying is that if you only view the world in that way, then you're only going to ... The only logical conclusion is violence instead of trying to figure out like, okay, there are people who have stuff and there's other people that don't have stuff. And there's bad people and there's good people, whatever. That all exists. Why can't we do like Rodney King? Why can't we just get along?
Joel Bowman:
Right. Well I mean even just in purely economic terms, the debate ought to be fairly well closed at this point for anybody to pay any attention to who was digging graves throughout the 20th century. And the experiment was run and it was run in Russia, in China, in large parts of Southeast Asia, up and down this continent that I'm speaking to you from here. It was run in parts of Africa. And everywhere, no matter what the climate, what the natural resources of the place, the cultural inclinations of the people, no matter what came before them. When this was run in all of its various iterations, whether it was Castroism or Maoism or Stalinism or Leninism or Trotskyism or any other ism that you care to point to that is on that end of the spectrum, the results are horrific and speak for themselves.
Joel Bowman:
When we cede small points, we open a wedge, I think, that makes it difficult for people who are coming along behind us to navigate properly. And so you get this kind of confusion and this bumbling around where people don't know that you can't have a command economy no matter how many bright sparks you get into a room. No matter how much Ersatzkaffee you give them and under a dim light and with a whiteboard market to get them to figure out how many shoes need to be made or how many loaves need to be baked. It doesn't work like that.
Joel Bowman:
The way that markets work, most efficiently for the production of capital goods, is division of labor, a la Mr. Smith, and the invisible hand left to do its work in the way that Mr. Leonard Read had with his I, Pencil essay. We don't need to know how to mine lead and mill wood and get the yellow paint and chop down the rubber trees. We don't need to know how to do all that stuff. All we need to know how to do is the job in front of us. We need to know how to do it well, to specialize, and that liberates us to spend our time in other pursuits and to escape that kind of merely commodified existence which seems to be ... I mean, ironically enough, it's the entire preconception of the Marxist mentality in the same way that race is the entire preeminent figuring in the mind of the anti-racists. All they see everywhere is race. All that these people see is that which they are trying to get past, it doesn't make any sense.
Addison Wiggin:
When we first started talking today, you had just done a piece of your own on neo-Wilsonian progressives. So that's a muffle. I got what you meant immediately because I had already written a bunch of stuff on Wilson's influence in the early 20th century and then through his own presidency which enacted the federal reserve. A lot of the problems that we are addressing now like fiat money and stuff like that. But your points seem to be a little bit deeper than that. It sounded like you had read a little bit more than I might have on Wilson and to your own conclusions there.
Joel Bowman:
Yeah. It's a rotten onion when you start peeling back the layers on his mischievous acts. You keep peeling and you keep finding more rot. But yeah essentially, Wilson was ... To cut directly to the heart of it, Wilson was the first president, the 28th president of the United States, but the first president to openly and roundly, in George Will's words, hack at the founding documents, root and branch.
Joel Bowman:
And so he believed, in contrast to the founders who held that rights were inalienable and that they were natural and that they preceded government. And therefore, was government's responsibility to secure those rights. Wilson held, as did his progressive acolytes around him like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and others that their apprehension of the subject was that rights were not natural, that they didn't precede government, that rather they were privileges and they were contingent upon certain behavior. And so that they were to be conferred by the government.
Joel Bowman:
Now the founders used the word secure in the very first sentence of the Constitution so it wasn't like they were trying to hide it deep in the Ts and Cs or the fine print on anything. No, they were fairly adamant about this. Madison talks a lot about it in the Federalist Papers. But he, Wilson, really, really deeply disagreed with this. He saw the role of the state as something like a cudgel to beat and shape society into the shape that he thought it ought to represent, rather than letting the individuals with their own natural rights express their own wills, desires, fears, hopes, dreams, what have you, in their own lives.
Joel Bowman:
He saw the role of the government as to withhold rights from people based on certain behaviors that he wished for them to undertake. So it's not surprising when you understand the core philosophy of someone like Wilson's why he would, for example, as you mentioned, introduce the Federal Reserve Act which he did in his first year in office. The Revenue Act which gifted Americans the income tax, so you can thank Wilson for that one. It was Wilson who with the aid of that slippery propagandist, Eddie Bernays who's were found among Goebbels's favorites. It was those two who concocted the marketing slogan to sell World War I to an otherwise war-weary America that had just remembered a generation earlier, concluded their own bloody civil war. They wanted nothing to do with foreign entanglements, as Jefferson had pointed out much, much earlier in the piece. It was those two, Wilson and Bernays, who concocted the phrase, "Making the world safe for Democracy," which we now take as just something that befalls the world's policemen to do. But that was a pure marketing slogan.
Joel Bowman:
And so the kinds of things that Wilson was up to during his two terms, and he ran for a third time by the way, despite having had suffered a stroke in 1919. But was roundly defeated. In any case, the kinds of things that he was up to during those eight years are not at all surprising when you recognize what his fundamental beliefs were.
Addison Wiggin:
Yeah, well and we end up with -
Joel Bowman:
And that's what we're circling back to now.
Joel Bowman:
League of Nations ... Yeah, exactly.
Addison Wiggin:
Which actually, we have a tie to. We wrote about this in The New Empire of Death. We have a direct tie to the first draft of the League of Nations. It was written in the library in 14 W which is ... I actually went to the Maryland Historical Society to verify because the story had been told and I'm like is that really true? But it's actually a historical record.
Joel Bowman:
Right.
Addison Wiggin:
And so he wrote it and because he is noted for getting us into World War I is guaranteeing Belgian neutrality and 14 W, which is the headquarters of our corporation, was the Marburg Mansion. And Marburg was the ambassador to Belgium at that time.
Joel Bowman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Addison Wiggin:
So we're directly connected to this progressive story even though we probably don't agree with a lot of it. Where do you see progressives going now? Because if I could take you through Empire of Dept a little bit, we had Wilson and then we had Coolidge. Coolidge was on the market side. And then we had FDR who battled the Great Depression. And then we had Eisenhower who wanted the government to build roads. And then you had Kennedy and Johnson who wanted to dominate the world again just like Wilson did. And that caused a problem.
Addison Wiggin:
And then we get to Reagan and his whole era where he's like, the only way we can dominate the world is just to beat the shit out of everyone. And so then he used government debt for the first time to really facilitate the massive Military complex that Eisenhower warned us against. And then you go back and forth. And it doesn't really matter who's in charge anymore because now that we have this big system of debt and Military that we could vote in Trump or we could vote in ... Who's the current guy?
Joel Bowman:
Sleepy Joe.
Addison Wiggin:
Sleepy Joe Biden. Like it doesn't really matter who's in charge anymore because it's just this big behemoth that doesn't-
Joel Bowman:
Yeah, he could literally be asleep...
Addison Wiggin:
So here's a good question then, in light of all of that. Where are the Walt Whitmans Where are the Woody Guthries? Where are the people who are actually saying they were progressives themselves, but they were saying just let us do our thing and we'll survive.
Joel Bowman:
Yeah. I mean I entirely agree with the broad...
Addison Wiggin:
Maybe it's just Morris, Morris, Alive.
Joel Bowman:
It's Morris, Alone. Morris, Alone.
Addison Wiggin:
At the moment.
Joel Bowman:
At the moment, yeah. Well and so that goes back to what fronts are we fighting on? Are we on our own echo chambers?
Addison Wiggin:
Well I think that's my biggest critique of social media is that we are, we're stuck in our own echo chambers. We only hear what we want to hear now.
Joel Bowman:
Yeah. Exactly.
Addison Wiggin:
How do you engage in society if you're literally not willing to listen to the person who's walking next to you on the sidewalk?
Joel Bowman:
Yeah. I mean you're talking to somebody who wrote a hundred thousand words work of literary fiction in an age where people can barely concentrate beyond the 140 characters. So you might be talking to the wrong guy there. But yeah, I agree with your general assessment of the past century. In that essay that you mentioned, Center Cannot Hold, I took some of Joan Didion's, some inspiration from her. She was around at the time, as you'll know, in the 60s and she was covering a lot of what was happening in the Haight-Ashbury, counter-cultural malaise of that period.
Joel Bowman:
And I just thought it was very interesting that a lot of the spiritual heroes that progressives cite today when they look back in history, they like to think that they are aligned in some way with civil rights activists, for example, from that particular era of US history, when nothing can be further from the truth. And so I just teased out the big five ways that they were absolutely anathema to those activists. And that was, of course, with regards to free speech, that they are absolutely antagonistic towards now and you only have to pick up a newspaper or witness what's happening in American academies to see who got canceled last week or who's going to get canceled next week. So we have that.
Joel Bowman:
We have the folks in the 60s who were very much anti-establishment, very much anti-Military which is fairly much the opposite of what we have presently where the last two democratic presidential candidates both voted adamantly for the invasion of Iraq, among no end of other foreign Military misadventures and expensive ones at that. We had a movement that encompassed Civil Rights issues, both with regards to race and gender. We have a look at the progressives today. They are among the most rabid bunch of neo-segregationists to be found anywhere in the Union. So that is another way that they've managed to disgrace themselves. And there were a couple of other ones that I had in there. Oh, bodily autonomy happened to be one where people in the 60s wanted nothing more than to be left alone to take whatever drugs they wanted, whether it was contraceptives or recreational LSD, what have you, and were very, very fearful of the government encroaching upon that most sacred of civil liberties.
Joel Bowman:
And now, we're again every other day we hear of some new medical mandate that the government is handing down and dictating to people. So it seems to be a complete about face when it comes to the modern progressive sensibilities and those who might consider themselves descendants of some peace-loving hippies. But if you take it all the way back and you realize the founding of American's progressive movement, you find that it was Wilson who introduced the Sedition Act and clamped down on pacifists and conscientious objectors to the 1st World War. It was Wilson who was an out and out racist, both during his tenure as a president at Princeton and while he was presiding over the presidential administration and oversaw the segregation of federal offices, the Military. I mean these are things that your listeners can look up. For the moment, they'll probably be scrubbed from Wikipedia in not too long. But-
Addison Wiggin:
Just after you say it.
Joel Bowman:
There are textbooks out there that are physical and that will take a little longer to hunt down and burn. But we know that he was hugely Militaristic. He yanked the Americans into World War I after all. And on practically every front, that the self-described new left were fighting in the 60s, Wilson was diametrically opposed to them as are today's progressives. So I just thought that was an interesting full circle to have come. I'm not exonerating, by the way, the new left for their economic illiteracy and people have pointed out to me since that article, and I agree with this assessment that yes, of course these people were championing free speech. But when they got it, they were the first ones to usher in the age of political correctness. They were, of course, against the police and against the state. But after a very Marxist fashion, when it was their team at the top of the power totem pole, they had no problem using the cudgel of the state to suppress their own enemies. So yes, I was perhaps being a little too charitable to the new left then. But I really just wanted to underscore how far progressives have drifted from those that they would think of as their spiritual ancestors.
Addison Wiggin:
You know what would be fun? A debate between you and AOC.
Joel Bowman:
You should send her an invite to the show. You can moderate.
Joel Bowman:
Yeah, let's do it.
Addison Wiggin:
For some reason, I get her tweets. Like how the hell did that ever happen? I get her tweets. So maybe I'll just tweet her back.
Joel Bowman:
Yeah, just tweet her back. Hey, let's have a debate...-
Addison Wiggin:
Just to be clear, that's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Joel Bowman:
Yes. The congress menstruating person from New York. And let's have them on because ... You'll have to do it quickly because we only have 12 years before the world ends. So we'll have to be-
Addison Wiggin:
Yeah, according to them.
Joel Bowman:
We'll have to be snappy. Time is of the essence.
Addison Wiggin:
At least they can tweet in the meantime.
Joel Bowman:
Yeah, exactly...
Addison Wiggin:
There's no energy that goes into sending tweets.
Joel Bowman:
Right, right, yeah, exactly, exactly.
Addison Wiggin:
All right, man, this was fun. Hold up your book again.
Joel Bowman:
Morris, Alive-
Addison Wiggin:
You can get that on Amazon.
Joel Bowman:
You can get that on Amazon, that's right. On the river of no returns, go and buy a book, make it click. And I didn't mention but it makes a perfect Christmas gift for aspiring progressives. Maybe you can inoculate them against their wayward philosophies before it really takes hold.
Addison Wiggin:
You said it, I didn't.
Joel Bowman:
Good man.
Addison Wiggin:
All right, Joel, thank you. Talk to you soon.
Joel Bowman:
Thanks, Addison. Lot of fun, thanks, man.
Joel Bowman:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Bonner Private Research Podcast. You can find more conversations like this in the members only section of our website. We look forward to hearing from you. Until next week ...
Joel Bowman and Addison Wiggin discuss The Idea of America