Is there value in historical analogies? Yes and no. Many have tried to make comparisons between Donald Trump and Adolph Hitler that end up not being helpful to understand the times we are living in. But then there are other times when looking at how past societies dealt with creeping authoritarianism can serve as a lesson for contemporary politics.
In this conversation, Bethel University professor Chris Gehrz examines the unsettling nature of life under the concept of the dual state, particularly in the context of the Trump administration, and the implications for Christians in the United States and American democracy.
Suggested Reading and Listening:
One Nation Under a Dual State by Chris Gehrz
The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship by Ernst Fraenkel
America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State by Aziz Huq
The Frightening Precedents for Trump’s ‘Legal Abyss’ by Amanda Taub
Related Episodes:
Should Christians Leave Trump's America? with Amy Mantravadi | Episode 245
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00:00:00 --> 00:00:06 In this episode of Church and Main, we look at the rise of the dual state,
00:00:06 --> 00:00:13 a place where there is freedom for some until there is freedom for none. That's coming up.
00:00:14 --> 00:00:41 Music.
00:00:41 --> 00:00:47 Hello, and welcome to Church and Maine. This is a podcast that tries to live up to,
00:00:48 --> 00:00:55 that saying by the theologian Karl Barth, to look at things with a news on one
00:00:55 --> 00:01:01 hand and the Bible and the other, and interpreting the events through the Bible.
00:01:03 --> 00:01:06 This is a podcast about the intersection of faith, politics,
00:01:06 --> 00:01:09 and culture. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host.
00:01:10 --> 00:01:14 In September of 1938, there was a young lawyer.
00:01:14 --> 00:01:20 He packed up his suitcases, and he quickly left his home in Berlin,
00:01:21 --> 00:01:25 heading first to the United Kingdom and then later to the United States.
00:01:26 --> 00:01:32 At the same time that this was happening, as he was leaving Germany, his manuscript was,
00:01:34 --> 00:01:37 something that he had written, was being smuggled out separately.
00:01:38 --> 00:01:43 These writings were a testament to what was going on in Germany,
00:01:43 --> 00:01:48 showing how the country went from a fledgling democracy to an outright dictatorship.
00:01:49 --> 00:01:56 This young man was Ernst Frankel, who was a Jewish labor lawyer.
00:01:57 --> 00:02:02 His manuscript would be published two years later, as the world was plunged
00:02:02 --> 00:02:08 into the early days of World War II, and it was entitled The Dual State.
00:02:08 --> 00:02:13 And in this book, Frankl shows how an advanced nation like Germany,
00:02:14 --> 00:02:18 one that had the rule of law, all the trappings of democracy,
00:02:18 --> 00:02:27 became this dictatorship and probably one of the most heinous dictatorships in history.
00:02:28 --> 00:02:33 Writing in The Atlantic back in March, University of Chicago professor Aziz
00:02:33 --> 00:02:40 Houck, and I should add, the University of Chicago is where Frankl later ended up as a professor.
00:02:40 --> 00:02:45 He describes the premise of the book, The Dual State, this way.
00:02:45 --> 00:02:52 He says, quote, The book explains how the Nazi regime managed to keep on track
00:02:52 --> 00:02:58 a capitalist economy governed by stable laws and maintain a day-to-day normalcy
00:02:58 --> 00:02:59 for many of its citizens,
00:02:59 --> 00:03:05 while at the same time establishing a domain of lawlessness and state violence
00:03:05 --> 00:03:09 in order to realize its terrible vision of ethno-nationalism.
00:03:10 --> 00:03:17 Hook's article sees parallels to Donald Trump's rule in Washington seeing that
00:03:17 --> 00:03:23 to the period that Frankel documents and the fact of the matter is.
00:03:25 --> 00:03:32 Today's guest also sees those parallels. On July 4th, Bethel University professor
00:03:32 --> 00:03:38 Chris Gertz thought and wrote about the dual state in his article,
00:03:38 --> 00:03:40 One Nation Under a Dual State.
00:03:40 --> 00:03:46 He talks about the implications of living in a nation where there is a normative
00:03:46 --> 00:03:51 or quote-unquote normal state where things seem to go like they always have,
00:03:51 --> 00:03:56 and a prerogative state where there seems to be no rules.
00:03:57 --> 00:04:04 Now, I can already see some people rolling their eyes because this is yet another
00:04:04 --> 00:04:06 comparison of Donald Trump to Hitler.
00:04:06 --> 00:04:09 And trust me, I'm never crazy about that analogy.
00:04:10 --> 00:04:16 I don't like it. It's one that in some ways sometimes once I want to shut down,
00:04:17 --> 00:04:18 it's used way too freely.
00:04:21 --> 00:04:26 But I think and I think sometimes in our own country we don't know as much about
00:04:26 --> 00:04:31 history but we so we go for what we know and so of course everyone wants to talk about Hitler,
00:04:34 --> 00:04:41 but the thing is reading Hook's article and then later talking to um to Chris
00:04:41 --> 00:04:46 Geertz it made it really hard for me to shake off the comparisons,
00:04:47 --> 00:04:50 I'm not saying that we are going to become a new Reich.
00:04:50 --> 00:04:54 I'm not saying that Donald Trump is Hitler or MAGA are the Nazis.
00:04:56 --> 00:05:00 But it is hard to not notice some of the parallels.
00:05:02 --> 00:05:05 And this also raises some questions. What does it mean for the church?
00:05:05 --> 00:05:07 What does it mean for Christians?
00:05:08 --> 00:05:12 The fact is, while most Christians here in America aren't experiencing any kind
00:05:12 --> 00:05:19 of cruelty of the state, we're not really seeing agents coming in and disrupting our services, and,
00:05:21 --> 00:05:25 If you were to, say, read a magazine like Christianity Today,
00:05:25 --> 00:05:27 which is doing a great job,
00:05:28 --> 00:05:33 on documenting this, you will see that immigrant congregations are facing a
00:05:33 --> 00:05:39 climate of fear, where congregants and even pastors might be taken away by Immigrations
00:05:39 --> 00:05:42 and Customs Enforcement or ICE officers.
00:05:44 --> 00:05:48 I will be honest, I think that this is probably the most unsettling episode
00:05:48 --> 00:05:53 of Church in Maine that I've ever done, but I think it is an episode that people
00:05:53 --> 00:05:59 of faith need to listen to because I think the times demand it.
00:06:00 --> 00:06:04 Chris Gertz is a professor of history at Bethel University in St.
00:06:04 --> 00:06:07 Paul, Minnesota. He's written three books on pietism.
00:06:08 --> 00:06:13 This is actually his third time back on the podcast. The first two were to talk about pietism.
00:06:13 --> 00:06:19 He grew up in the Evangelical Covenant Church, which is a pietist denomination.
00:06:20 --> 00:06:25 And this is, though, of course, this is probably the first time that we're not
00:06:25 --> 00:06:30 talking about his pietist roots, but we are focusing on something that is near
00:06:30 --> 00:06:34 and dear to him as a professor, and that is history.
00:06:36 --> 00:06:41 So, please join me in this conversation with Chris Yertz.
00:06:43 --> 00:07:01 Music.
00:07:01 --> 00:07:05 Well, Chris, it's good to have you back. And I think before we go into our conversation,
00:07:06 --> 00:07:11 I know you've been on the podcast a few times before, but for people who may
00:07:11 --> 00:07:16 not know who you are, just to give an introduction for the people.
00:07:17 --> 00:07:18 Yeah, thanks, Tess. It's good to be back.
00:07:19 --> 00:07:23 My name is Chris Gerrits. I am professor of history and co-chair of the History,
00:07:23 --> 00:07:26 Philosophy, Political Science Department at Bethel University,
00:07:26 --> 00:07:30 which is a small Christian school in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota.
00:07:32 --> 00:07:37 All right. Well, I think the first one of the reasons I had you back is an article
00:07:37 --> 00:07:42 that I think I read and then I kind of read it by way of the New York Times.
00:07:42 --> 00:07:44 And then you also have read it.
00:07:45 --> 00:07:53 And it is basically about what has been called kind of life under what is called the dual state.
00:07:56 --> 00:08:02 Um first is to maybe talk a little bit about your article of what you were seeing about that,
00:08:02 --> 00:08:05 you know what was it that prompted you to write this
00:08:05 --> 00:08:10 article and maybe while we are there to talk about what is the dual state yeah
00:08:10 --> 00:08:15 so let me i'll get to the dual state idea um but maybe just a couple of things
00:08:15 --> 00:08:18 to sort of set up why i was thinking about it was like right before fourth of
00:08:18 --> 00:08:23 july so it's a good mode to think about your country and and how you live even
00:08:23 --> 00:08:25 in what you see going on in it.
00:08:26 --> 00:08:30 I guess two things I was mostly thinking about. First of all,
00:08:30 --> 00:08:36 the tension of realizing how much I enjoy about my life, how normal it seems,
00:08:36 --> 00:08:40 how much my kids are flourishing, how much my job appeals to me.
00:08:41 --> 00:08:44 There's so many good things in my life. And at the same time,
00:08:44 --> 00:08:47 I just had this creeping sense of, if not dread,
00:08:48 --> 00:08:54 worry about the United States and some of its institutions and some of the norms
00:08:54 --> 00:08:56 that I associate with it and its values.
00:08:57 --> 00:09:00 And that kind of leads me to sort of frequent thing I struggle with,
00:09:01 --> 00:09:04 which is I don't write a lot about politics, right? I am not a political scientist.
00:09:05 --> 00:09:09 I'm not a political commentator. My substack, like the blog before it,
00:09:09 --> 00:09:11 is mostly about religion, history, education.
00:09:13 --> 00:09:17 And yet, I've got to be honest, like ever since Donald Trump ran for president,
00:09:17 --> 00:09:23 became the Republican nominee in 2015-16, I've really been concerned that this is not normal.
00:09:24 --> 00:09:27 The kind of candidate he was, the kind of president he was in his first term
00:09:27 --> 00:09:32 and what he's been in the first six months of his second term doesn't strike
00:09:32 --> 00:09:35 me as an interested amateur, at least, as being normal.
00:09:36 --> 00:09:41 And maybe that's okay, right? Maybe a point we should get into is that maybe
00:09:41 --> 00:09:44 normal is not always a good thing, right?
00:09:44 --> 00:09:47 And maybe norms need to be challenged and changed.
00:09:48 --> 00:09:54 But in ways that really concern me, I saw I'm transgressing norms that I associate
00:09:54 --> 00:09:55 with American democracy.
00:09:55 --> 00:09:57 And so I really try not to write a lot about politics.
00:09:58 --> 00:10:04 And when I do, I don't want to be partisan, right? I recognize that I probably
00:10:04 --> 00:10:08 lean to the left from the center. I disagree with Donald Trump and conservative
00:10:08 --> 00:10:09 Republicans about a lot of different
00:10:09 --> 00:10:13 issues, even though I can see their argument. I can see their point.
00:10:13 --> 00:10:15 I'm comfortable talking about that with students, right?
00:10:17 --> 00:10:20 But I also think there are certain principles, right, that wherever you stand
00:10:20 --> 00:10:25 on a partisan spectrum, like, we've all got to be able to agree to this is how government functions.
00:10:25 --> 00:10:29 This is central to our polity, right?
00:10:29 --> 00:10:34 And it worries me sometimes that you almost can't have that sort of discussion
00:10:34 --> 00:10:35 without seeming like you're partisan.
00:10:36 --> 00:10:40 And so I'm always looking for ways to help people to think about what's really
00:10:40 --> 00:10:45 at stake here that's not simply a Democrat criticizing Republican or vice versa.
00:10:45 --> 00:10:50 So that, I think, is why when the article in The Atlantic first came out about
00:10:50 --> 00:10:55 the dual state theory, I didn't write about it right away, but I kind of saved it in my bookmarks.
00:10:55 --> 00:10:59 And I came back to it a couple of times and then hanging in fourth of July,
00:10:59 --> 00:11:02 I thought I should take a shot at reflecting. Does this help me then understand
00:11:02 --> 00:11:06 why I'm worried, even as so much of my own life seems normal.
00:11:07 --> 00:11:10 So that's an overlong introduction. I should probably now say what the dual
00:11:10 --> 00:11:14 state is, but let me pause if there's anything you want to follow up on, Dennis.
00:11:14 --> 00:11:18 No, I think that that is, that kind of sums up a lot of.
00:11:19 --> 00:11:25 What's been going on. I think we're all trying to figure out what has been going
00:11:25 --> 00:11:27 on in the last decade or so.
00:11:29 --> 00:11:38 And I think that there is something deeply wrong with how things are going right now.
00:11:39 --> 00:11:43 And the thing that is interesting about, as you brought up something earlier
00:11:43 --> 00:11:46 about norms, and sometimes norms need to be challenged.
00:11:46 --> 00:11:51 And I think there is something to that. sometimes the norms can become corrupted.
00:11:51 --> 00:11:55 Sometimes they don't always serve the people that they were intended to serve.
00:11:56 --> 00:12:02 And the thing with, at least for me, with Donald Trump, is that some of the
00:12:02 --> 00:12:07 things that he brings up are issues. They're wrong. They're things that are problems.
00:12:07 --> 00:12:12 I think for me that has always been the issue is not the issues themselves,
00:12:12 --> 00:12:16 it's how he tackles them. And,
00:12:18 --> 00:12:27 how he tackles them does have an effect on American democracy as a whole.
00:12:31 --> 00:12:37 For some people, there is a sense that the ends justify the means,
00:12:37 --> 00:12:41 but there's a danger in that.
00:12:41 --> 00:12:44 And so I think some of
00:12:44 --> 00:12:47 what you're talking about does make sense that there is
00:12:47 --> 00:12:50 something something that's
00:12:50 --> 00:12:54 askew that's going on in our society um
00:12:54 --> 00:12:57 that i think especially the article that we're talking about
00:12:57 --> 00:13:00 uh referencing is rather
00:13:00 --> 00:13:06 insidious which makes it even more unsettling right
00:13:06 --> 00:13:09 so the article came out in the atlantic um
00:13:09 --> 00:13:12 i think it was actually march and then they updated so it's like
00:13:12 --> 00:13:15 early april is the is the date on the byline uh it
00:13:15 --> 00:13:19 was written by a university of chicago law professor named aziz hook
00:13:19 --> 00:13:24 i'm not quite sure how to pronounce his last name i think that's how you pronounce
00:13:24 --> 00:13:30 it and it's about um a german legal scholar named erin sprenkel and i mentioned
00:13:30 --> 00:13:34 in my post it's not super relevant but i actually like i recognized the name
00:13:34 --> 00:13:38 for a different reason which is when I was in graduate school,
00:13:38 --> 00:13:42 I wrote my dissertation on education in Germany, both under and after the Nazis.
00:13:43 --> 00:13:46 And so I was looking at military occupation, right? The Americans,
00:13:46 --> 00:13:49 the French, the British, and Frankl actually had written a book about this after World War I.
00:13:49 --> 00:13:53 And so I knew Ernst Frankl's name, but I didn't actually know the book he's
00:13:53 --> 00:13:58 most famous for, which is called The Dual State, something like a contribution
00:13:58 --> 00:14:00 to the theory of dictatorship.
00:14:02 --> 00:14:06 And so Frankl was a German lawyer, but also a Jewish German,
00:14:07 --> 00:14:12 I should say, and was able to keep practicing law because he had been a World War I veteran.
00:14:13 --> 00:14:17 And so long after most Jews in Germany had lost their civil rights,
00:14:17 --> 00:14:21 access to the professions, he was still representing fellow Jews.
00:14:22 --> 00:14:26 Trade union leaders, socialists, free thinkers, other people who tended to be
00:14:26 --> 00:14:27 targets of the Nazi dictatorship. ship.
00:14:28 --> 00:14:32 And so he started writing this manuscript. And then by 1938,
00:14:32 --> 00:14:35 and I can't remember if he left before or after a Kristallnacht,
00:14:35 --> 00:14:40 but as the persecution of Jews intensified, he fled, came to the United States,
00:14:40 --> 00:14:45 the University of Chicago, and it was either 1940 or 41, he finally published
00:14:45 --> 00:14:46 his book, The Dual State.
00:14:47 --> 00:14:53 And so in a nutshell, what he argued was that in a dictatorship like Nazi Germany,
00:14:54 --> 00:14:56 so he's using that particular version, but I think he
00:14:56 --> 00:15:00 meant to articulate a larger theory you can
00:15:00 --> 00:15:03 both have kind of the ordinary
00:15:03 --> 00:15:06 sort of business of the legal
00:15:06 --> 00:15:11 system right he calls it the normative state um which i mean he's talking about
00:15:11 --> 00:15:15 law i guess i want to think about it beyond simply like the criminal justice
00:15:15 --> 00:15:20 system or business law but he said like under nazi germany business proceeded
00:15:20 --> 00:15:24 in many ways for probably most people certainly most non-Jewish people,
00:15:24 --> 00:15:26 as usual, right?
00:15:26 --> 00:15:29 And he was part of that system. And he could even tell stories about it,
00:15:29 --> 00:15:33 like legal system functions as usual, business goes on.
00:15:34 --> 00:15:38 But at the same time, and kind of in parallel with, although I wonder if it's
00:15:38 --> 00:15:42 also not connected with, you get something he called the prerogative state,
00:15:43 --> 00:15:47 in which norms are being violated, right?
00:15:47 --> 00:15:52 And a prerogative is something that applies only to a certain person or to a
00:15:52 --> 00:15:57 certain class or party or group or whatever it is, and they are beyond the scope of the law.
00:15:58 --> 00:16:02 And so that's where you can start. I think this actually is what we mostly think
00:16:02 --> 00:16:05 about if we think about Nazi Germany, right?
00:16:05 --> 00:16:08 The kind of ways that the secret police, the Gestapo, the SD,
00:16:08 --> 00:16:13 others functioned, the kinds of particular corruption the Nazi party officials
00:16:13 --> 00:16:18 practice regularly to enrich themselves, the way violence was used against dissidents
00:16:18 --> 00:16:22 of different sorts, and then, of course, against Jews and other minority groups.
00:16:23 --> 00:16:29 And so, Frankl's point was that when dictatorship comes to a modern society,
00:16:29 --> 00:16:33 it doesn't come with the normative state simply disappearing overnight.
00:16:33 --> 00:16:36 Instead, you have both of these happening at the same time.
00:16:37 --> 00:16:43 Um, and so, I mean, I, I think that, I mean, as I guess the only expertise I
00:16:43 --> 00:16:46 offer here is someone who actually does study Nazi Germany, teaches Nazi Germany,
00:16:47 --> 00:16:50 like, I think that is a good way of describing what life is like under the Nazis.
00:16:51 --> 00:16:54 Um, I actually think about it because one of my favorite authors is Philip Carr,
00:16:54 --> 00:17:00 who is a late Scottish author, wrote a series of detective novels set in and after Nazi Germany.
00:17:01 --> 00:17:03 And they're actually Apple TV is about to film one of them.
00:17:04 --> 00:17:08 Um and this is kind of a theme that runs through these stories of this detective
00:17:08 --> 00:17:12 named bernie gunther is he's trying to enforce the law like investigating murders
00:17:12 --> 00:17:16 and kidnappings under a government of criminals right and so he is trying to
00:17:16 --> 00:17:21 do his job as an ordinary part of this apparatus even as he's he kind of sees
00:17:21 --> 00:17:24 the prerogative state growing and growing and growing,
00:17:24 --> 00:17:28 and making it more difficult for the normative state to do its job and so like
00:17:28 --> 00:17:32 historically that makes a lot of sense to me i think the question is and this
00:17:32 --> 00:17:35 is what hook is trying to suggest, does this give us a way of understanding
00:17:35 --> 00:17:38 what has been happening under Donald Trump?
00:17:38 --> 00:17:43 Right. And it helps me to understand why, in many respects, my life is just going on as usual,
00:17:43 --> 00:17:49 even as I worry about maybe some more fundamental changes taking place that,
00:17:49 --> 00:17:55 for reasons good and bad, norms are being suspended, and maybe there's this
00:17:55 --> 00:17:58 prerogative being carved out apart from the rule of law.
00:18:00 --> 00:18:04 So there are two things that in looking at this and you even bring this up in
00:18:04 --> 00:18:10 your own article on your sub stack is when we kind of talk about this is,
00:18:11 --> 00:18:14 and I can probably hear people who are listening to say to that,
00:18:14 --> 00:18:17 not another Nazi analogy, um,
00:18:18 --> 00:18:22 and even I get really nervous.
00:18:22 --> 00:18:25 It's like people toss up the word fascism.
00:18:26 --> 00:18:31 It's just, you know, it's a tense. It's become like a two-cent word.
00:18:31 --> 00:18:34 People just kind of say it all the time. And I'm always wary about that for
00:18:34 --> 00:18:38 a lot of reasons, historical reasons, all of that.
00:18:39 --> 00:18:43 And yet, there are things to learn from history.
00:18:43 --> 00:18:46 You can't just, you know, one of the things that I have been,
00:18:46 --> 00:18:51 I need to get back to reading it, but I've been reading is a book by a professor
00:18:51 --> 00:18:54 from, Pittsburgh Seminary.
00:18:54 --> 00:19:01 They wrote a book about Karl Barth and his what they call emergency homiletic.
00:19:01 --> 00:19:09 He was, at that time, a professor around the time of the rise of Hitler coming in in 1932-33.
00:19:09 --> 00:19:15 And so he was basically doing some how to preach in this context.
00:19:16 --> 00:19:21 Now, I don't want to say that the context that we're in is exactly what,
00:19:22 --> 00:19:29 Karl Barth was dealing with 100 years ago. And yet, there are lessons to be learned from that.
00:19:29 --> 00:19:35 So I guess my first question here is, what do you say to people when they might
00:19:35 --> 00:19:38 immediately roll their eyes and say, not another Nazi analogy?
00:19:38 --> 00:19:42 Yeah, I mean, I think it's something I'll talk about, not just this particular
00:19:42 --> 00:19:46 analogy, but the use of historical analogies I talked about with my students all the time.
00:19:48 --> 00:19:53 On the one hand, they're very helpful, right? I mean, how we do this, all the time.
00:19:53 --> 00:19:56 We think about things by comparison to other things, right?
00:19:56 --> 00:19:59 Especially if we understand something that's new, that's novel,
00:20:00 --> 00:20:03 that's changed, that doesn't quite fit pre-existing categories,
00:20:03 --> 00:20:06 you need to compare it to something that's gone before.
00:20:06 --> 00:20:10 That's just a very typical way we do this. American politicians do all the time, right?
00:20:11 --> 00:20:14 They make constant analogies back to previous American experiences,
00:20:14 --> 00:20:19 whether it's wars or heading into next year will be the revolution,
00:20:19 --> 00:20:20 the Declaration of Independence,
00:20:20 --> 00:20:25 we hear this a lot, but the very nature of history is that things are changing
00:20:25 --> 00:20:29 over time, and things are responsive to different contexts, right?
00:20:29 --> 00:20:33 And so every analogy is by definition flawed in certain ways.
00:20:33 --> 00:20:38 It's never a perfect analogy. That doesn't exist. That's not possible, right?
00:20:39 --> 00:20:42 We could spend the rest of this time just talking about the differences between
00:20:42 --> 00:20:46 Germany of the 1930s and the United States of the 2020s, right?
00:20:46 --> 00:20:51 And so I guess partly I want to say to those people, you're right.
00:20:51 --> 00:20:54 We should be cautious about using this analogy.
00:20:54 --> 00:20:57 I hope you're equally cautious about all historical analogies then.
00:20:57 --> 00:21:02 So that's the first point. The second would be, I do worry about this myself.
00:21:02 --> 00:21:07 I think partly because it cheapens things if we just constantly are trotting
00:21:07 --> 00:21:10 out Hitler-Nazi analogies. And there is something.
00:21:11 --> 00:21:17 Unique and uniquely troubling and demented and evil about the experience of
00:21:17 --> 00:21:19 that particular chapter in history.
00:21:19 --> 00:21:25 You should be really cautious to simply use it as a convenient political cudgel against folks.
00:21:26 --> 00:21:30 Because in many ways, anything that we compare, certainly from American politics,
00:21:30 --> 00:21:33 is not remotely like Nazi Germany.
00:21:34 --> 00:21:37 And so the one exception I always will pull out is,
00:21:37 --> 00:21:41 and I did in the up in the substack piece um the
00:21:41 --> 00:21:44 Trump regime is not genocidal right like I
00:21:44 --> 00:21:47 mean and I think we use the word genocide too often we
00:21:47 --> 00:21:49 ought to be really careful we can use lots of
00:21:49 --> 00:21:53 other language to describe the problems of our opponents but but genocidal ought
00:21:53 --> 00:21:58 to be reserved for exceptional circumstances I don't think it applies here and
00:21:58 --> 00:22:02 so like is that itself enough to defeat and say well we should seek a different
00:22:02 --> 00:22:07 analogy because you can't it's I think it is hard for people to separate Nazi
00:22:07 --> 00:22:09 fascist from the story of the Holocaust,
00:22:10 --> 00:22:13 of the Showa and the other mass killings, the mass evils, right?
00:22:13 --> 00:22:16 And so that's why I tend to be a little nervous about this.
00:22:16 --> 00:22:20 And it's why, as I said in the substack, I'm glad the Huck actually at least
00:22:20 --> 00:22:24 alluded to some other versions of the dual state theory, right?
00:22:24 --> 00:22:30 The one that I think probably would be most familiar to Americans would be Putin's Russia, right?
00:22:30 --> 00:22:36 It is not fascist, right? It is It's not racialized in some sort of way.
00:22:36 --> 00:22:39 It's not genocidal, although there is certainly political violence.
00:22:41 --> 00:22:47 But I think it does fit well, right? I mean, Vladimir Putin has carved out certain
00:22:47 --> 00:22:52 prerogatives for himself that are not restrained in any way by the rule of law.
00:22:53 --> 00:22:56 Russian oligarchs do business quite normally. I mean,
00:22:56 --> 00:22:59 I think it's why sanctions against them was a relatively effective strategy
00:22:59 --> 00:23:05 after the 2022 invasion, because they were part of this larger sort of economy,
00:23:05 --> 00:23:09 and they suffered regular sort of economic prices by losing that business.
00:23:10 --> 00:23:14 The other one that Huck mentioned is probably less known to Americans,
00:23:14 --> 00:23:18 Singapore, right? The city-state that left Malaysia in the 1950s.
00:23:19 --> 00:23:24 So its founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, I think LKY is what he's usually called,
00:23:24 --> 00:23:28 he set up this system that to this day is a fully functioning,
00:23:28 --> 00:23:30 very prosperous, capitalist,
00:23:30 --> 00:23:34 free market economy, and yet has a semi-authoritarian regime in which there
00:23:34 --> 00:23:38 is very little space for civil liberty, for political dissent, right?
00:23:38 --> 00:23:43 I mean, that's very different from Hitler's version of the regime,
00:23:43 --> 00:23:45 right? And so maybe that's a better comparison.
00:23:46 --> 00:23:51 That's getting more at this notion of under the veneer of many ways a very free
00:23:51 --> 00:23:54 society, you've got these very illiberal features.
00:23:54 --> 00:23:57 The problem with that is no American is going to recognize that,
00:23:57 --> 00:24:02 right? It's not a useful analogy because the comparison point itself doesn't mean anything.
00:24:03 --> 00:24:07 I actually think probably the best one here that we should spend more time thinking
00:24:07 --> 00:24:09 about is something like Viktor Orban's Hungary.
00:24:09 --> 00:24:13 If you pay a lot of attention to what's happening on the political right,
00:24:13 --> 00:24:17 you would see this a lot because people like J.D. Vance go to Hungary.
00:24:17 --> 00:24:21 And they're quite pally with Orban, who was an anti-Soviet dissident in the
00:24:21 --> 00:24:28 90s, but has become this kind of new conservative figure who has made Hungary...
00:24:29 --> 00:24:32 I mean, it's a member of the EU, it's a member of NATO, but if you read Freedom
00:24:32 --> 00:24:36 House ratings every year, it's a partly free regime, right?
00:24:36 --> 00:24:39 Its judiciary has been brought under political control.
00:24:40 --> 00:24:43 Academic freedom has largely disappeared, right?
00:24:43 --> 00:24:47 The media is under significant control, even though there are multi-party elections
00:24:47 --> 00:24:52 that keep resulting in his party being re-elected.
00:24:52 --> 00:24:56 So I guess I would say you're right. We probably should be paying attention
00:24:56 --> 00:25:01 to maybe some of those non-genocidal, more contemporary comparisons like Putin and Orban.
00:25:02 --> 00:25:05 But, I mean, I have to do it because this is what I know best,
00:25:06 --> 00:25:09 right? Like, if I'm going to make an analogy, this is the one I actually understand.
00:25:10 --> 00:25:15 And I think what's hard for Americans is we have to accept there's not like
00:25:15 --> 00:25:16 an American analogy here.
00:25:16 --> 00:25:20 Like, I understand the temptation to think that, well, Trump is kind of like
00:25:20 --> 00:25:23 Andrew Jackson, right? I mean, as the sort of populist figure who's shaking
00:25:23 --> 00:25:28 things up in Washington, I don't think that goes far enough to capture the abnormality
00:25:28 --> 00:25:30 that's taking place in Washington.
00:25:30 --> 00:25:33 And so I guess what I've always said at the end of the day is cautiously,
00:25:33 --> 00:25:36 we need to be looking for non-American points of comparison,
00:25:36 --> 00:25:40 because those will help us see beyond our assumption that, well,
00:25:40 --> 00:25:43 America is unique and special and it can't happen here.
00:25:43 --> 00:25:49 I think it might be shocking to say there's at least some similarity with some
00:25:49 --> 00:25:53 part of what happened in Nazi Germany, but that at least gets people to think
00:25:53 --> 00:25:54 about what's really at stake.
00:25:55 --> 00:25:58 And maybe this is not simply about partisan policy differences.
00:25:58 --> 00:26:02 This is about fundamental features of how the system is supposed to work and
00:26:02 --> 00:26:03 why Trump is challenging it.
00:26:05 --> 00:26:10 I would have wondered, though, if there is one American analogy that would work,
00:26:10 --> 00:26:13 and I've thought about this since reading the article,
00:26:13 --> 00:26:23 is the American South, at least during probably slavery, but also Jim Crow.
00:26:25 --> 00:26:31 Because you could say that citizens certain citizens did have what would be a normal life,
00:26:32 --> 00:26:38 in in the south but obviously other citizens in this case who looked more like
00:26:38 --> 00:26:42 me did not and then it was a very much a prerogative state i don't know if that
00:26:42 --> 00:26:45 analogy does well and i think,
00:26:46 --> 00:26:49 i i can there are pluses and minuses to it but it's just something that i've
00:26:49 --> 00:26:52 been wondering about Yeah, I think that's fair.
00:26:52 --> 00:26:55 And I think obviously one of the things that's happened in the last six months
00:26:55 --> 00:27:03 that does get, I think, people concerned is what is happening to varieties of
00:27:03 --> 00:27:06 immigrants to this country, especially those of darker skin, right?
00:27:06 --> 00:27:09 And I think this is where my mind also goes to what you just said, Dallas.
00:27:10 --> 00:27:15 I'm not ready to call this genocidal, but it does seem like a sort of prerogative
00:27:15 --> 00:27:23 that sets aside things like due process is being used to deprive undocumented
00:27:23 --> 00:27:28 but also naturalized citizens of their status in American society, right?
00:27:28 --> 00:27:34 And I think that's, I think, a really good way of starting to think about the dual state idea.
00:27:35 --> 00:27:42 Mm-hmm. So let's just, let's kind of set this up then. What is it about the current.
00:27:46 --> 00:27:51 Administration that looks like it is performing a dual state?
00:27:51 --> 00:27:56 How would you, what do you see happening that shows that there is this normative
00:27:56 --> 00:28:02 state that is kind of the everyday thing, but then this prerogative state that is much more, you know,
00:28:03 --> 00:28:06 dangerous and, and what's kind of happening.
00:28:06 --> 00:28:10 And because one of the other things I wanted to talk about is that it seems
00:28:10 --> 00:28:17 like under what happened in Germany, the normative state did not, was not stable.
00:28:17 --> 00:28:19 It was always seeming to shrink.
00:28:20 --> 00:28:24 And so I kind of am curious about that. And where do you see the,
00:28:24 --> 00:28:30 it is the normative state here shrinking yeah and i think it's important like
00:28:30 --> 00:28:32 for just to start with the history here like um,
00:28:33 --> 00:28:36 i mean germany had a very well-established legal
00:28:36 --> 00:28:39 system right even before the weimar republic which
00:28:39 --> 00:28:44 is the democracy after world war one like it had the rule of law and by the
00:28:44 --> 00:28:49 way it also invented kind of modern notions of academic freedom um but you're
00:28:49 --> 00:28:53 right it did shrink quickly right under hitler it did kind of progressively
00:28:53 --> 00:28:57 get smaller and smaller as the prerogative state got bigger um.
00:28:58 --> 00:29:02 I mean, I guess the first thing I want to say, and I'm sorry I keep hedging
00:29:02 --> 00:29:05 everything before I actually make the observation, like, I want to acknowledge,
00:29:05 --> 00:29:09 like, there's legitimate debate about the size of the executive branch and the
00:29:09 --> 00:29:11 scope and the power of the executive branch.
00:29:12 --> 00:29:15 And this is as old as the American Constitution, right?
00:29:15 --> 00:29:21 I mean, the very notion of prerogative, right, comes from systems like Britain's
00:29:21 --> 00:29:23 early modern monarchy, right? Right.
00:29:24 --> 00:29:29 English, like other European kings, had prerogatives that pertained to them
00:29:29 --> 00:29:33 and were not restrained by any sort of representative democracy,
00:29:33 --> 00:29:39 any sort of legal system, any sort of written or unwritten constitution that's
00:29:39 --> 00:29:41 been changing in the century leading up to the American Revolution.
00:29:42 --> 00:29:45 And so nowadays, like in the British system, there's still a monarch,
00:29:45 --> 00:29:51 but all of the royal prerogatives have been inherited by a democratically elected government, right?
00:29:51 --> 00:29:54 The prime minister, the cabinets, the parties in parliament.
00:29:54 --> 00:29:59 And they are then also then bound by this well-developed sense of a constitution
00:29:59 --> 00:30:01 enforced by judiciary, right?
00:30:01 --> 00:30:03 Like a prerogative that a king
00:30:03 --> 00:30:07 used to have was like access to the mineral wealth of a kingdom, right?
00:30:07 --> 00:30:10 That's no longer for one person to exploit for their own sake.
00:30:10 --> 00:30:16 That now is under the government for the sake of the people under a constitution. To me.
00:30:17 --> 00:30:21 The most basic thing about the Trump administration that I wish we'd get a lot
00:30:21 --> 00:30:25 more attention that speaks to the idea of a prerogative state is simply the
00:30:25 --> 00:30:28 vastness of kleptocracy, right?
00:30:29 --> 00:30:33 Using the means of government for personal enrichment.
00:30:34 --> 00:30:37 I mean, we kind of talked about this a little bit during the first Trump administration.
00:30:38 --> 00:30:42 Like, all of a sudden, we paid attention to the emolument clauses in the first
00:30:42 --> 00:30:43 two articles of the Constitution.
00:30:44 --> 00:30:48 You're not supposed to take gifts from foreign nations or agencies for personal
00:30:48 --> 00:30:52 enrichment. You're not supposed to take gifts if you're the president from the
00:30:52 --> 00:30:54 government or from the state governments.
00:30:54 --> 00:30:59 But the basic principle is we don't want our leaders to be using the power we've
00:30:59 --> 00:31:04 entrusted them with for the sake of enriching themselves and maybe letting themselves
00:31:04 --> 00:31:06 be bribed to shape policy.
00:31:06 --> 00:31:10 Like in the last just two months, both the New York Times and the Atlantic in
00:31:10 --> 00:31:16 a separate article have published long, well-sourced reports on various forms
00:31:16 --> 00:31:20 of what in any other circumstance would be like national news leading corruption.
00:31:21 --> 00:31:28 Right. And it's not necessarily direct bribes, but it's things like crypto is
00:31:28 --> 00:31:29 probably the most famous version of this.
00:31:29 --> 00:31:32 And it's not even Trump personally, it's more of the Trump organization or his
00:31:32 --> 00:31:38 family, have already generated an enormous amount of wealth.
00:31:38 --> 00:31:42 Even if like crypto falls apart, they've already made a lot of money simply
00:31:42 --> 00:31:50 by deregulating crypto and by encouraging, by selling, right, Trump crypto.
00:31:51 --> 00:31:57 The other version of this is Trump organization properties in places like Qatar
00:31:57 --> 00:31:59 or Qatar or other parts of the Middle East.
00:31:59 --> 00:32:04 That doesn't maybe directly qualify as a bribe, but it sure seems like we're
00:32:04 --> 00:32:10 making deals with foreign governments that inherently benefit the president's organization.
00:32:11 --> 00:32:16 So I'd refer people just look up corruption, Trump in The New York Times and Atlantic.
00:32:17 --> 00:32:22 And it's like, normally those would be restrained by the rest of the normative
00:32:22 --> 00:32:23 state's apparatus, right?
00:32:23 --> 00:32:28 We've got whole offices in the Justice Department who are supposed to investigate
00:32:28 --> 00:32:30 allegations of corruption.
00:32:30 --> 00:32:33 We've got oversight committees in Congress that are supposed to pay attention to this.
00:32:35 --> 00:32:39 And I mean, I would guess most Americans haven't even heard of anything that
00:32:39 --> 00:32:43 I've just been talking about, right? This is not being restrained in any way.
00:32:44 --> 00:32:47 It'd be hard to imagine, like, all of a sudden, like, a special counsel being
00:32:47 --> 00:32:52 appointed to investigate concerns that the president is enriching himself to
00:32:52 --> 00:32:54 the tune of billions of dollars using his office.
00:32:55 --> 00:32:59 Or that, for example, he's somewhat accused him of selling pardons, right?
00:32:59 --> 00:33:03 Takes a million-dollar donation, and then all of a sudden someone's case is
00:33:03 --> 00:33:07 dropped or someone's sentence is commuted.
00:33:08 --> 00:33:12 That just seems like a very basic version and very familiar from the story of Nazi Germany.
00:33:12 --> 00:33:16 I mean, among other things, the Nazis were essentially an organized crime syndicate
00:33:16 --> 00:33:20 who used coercive power in order to enrich themselves,
00:33:20 --> 00:33:24 whether it's like Hermann Goering and his famous art collection or the kind
00:33:24 --> 00:33:28 of kickbacks that Hitler's chief of staff took on construction contracts.
00:33:28 --> 00:33:33 Like that was just a basic facet of the Nazi system, even as if anyone else
00:33:33 --> 00:33:36 did that, right, they might be they might be arrested, right,
00:33:36 --> 00:33:39 for for for embezzlement, for
00:33:39 --> 00:33:42 racketeering. that was just part of how the party apparatus functioned.
00:33:43 --> 00:33:47 So that's something that I don't think gets a lot of attention but seems bothersome
00:33:47 --> 00:33:51 to me and I think under any other president of any party or ideology,
00:33:51 --> 00:33:54 like this would be just an enormous scandal and we just kind of take it for
00:33:54 --> 00:33:57 granted that this is part of what Trump is like, right?
00:33:57 --> 00:34:01 He's probably getting wealthy off the backs of this, but that is very much not
00:34:01 --> 00:34:05 part of the norms of how American constitutional democracy functions.
00:34:06 --> 00:34:09 Why do you think though he's able to get away with it?
00:34:10 --> 00:34:15 I mean, I think it's amazing the amount to which we just have accustomed ourselves
00:34:15 --> 00:34:18 to, this is how Trump behaves.
00:34:18 --> 00:34:20 I don't know if it goes with him not being a politician, right?
00:34:20 --> 00:34:24 He's a businessman, right? So we just assume, well, he's a businessman.
00:34:24 --> 00:34:25 He's got business interests.
00:34:26 --> 00:34:28 But you're supposed to suspend those business interests, right?
00:34:28 --> 00:34:33 That's what's happened every time before an American president takes office,
00:34:33 --> 00:34:37 right? You've got to avoid even the appearance, right, of corruption.
00:34:37 --> 00:34:41 Even the appearance that you're going to give particular interest,
00:34:41 --> 00:34:45 you're going to, um, particularly benefit people, um, because they have a business
00:34:45 --> 00:34:48 connection to you. But we just assume, well, Trump is a dealer, right?
00:34:49 --> 00:34:53 He's, uh, this is his name. I mean, in some ways, this is what we wanted, a businessman in chief.
00:34:53 --> 00:34:57 So I'm just speculating here. I don't actually know really, but,
00:34:57 --> 00:35:02 um, to me, like, I just wish this would get a lot more coverage than it does,
00:35:03 --> 00:35:05 a lot more investigation than it does. Um, um.
00:35:06 --> 00:35:11 And it hasn't, for whatever reason. But I think generally, partly because it's
00:35:11 --> 00:35:15 now been 10 years, I think we've just accepted that this is just a different
00:35:15 --> 00:35:19 version of what an American politician and now an American president looks like.
00:35:19 --> 00:35:23 The other version, I don't know if this really fits the prerogative normative divide.
00:35:24 --> 00:35:30 I mean, just think about how commonly Donald Trump says things that are false.
00:35:31 --> 00:35:34 You know inflated numbers about things saying things
00:35:34 --> 00:35:37 that are patently untrue you can disprove quite quickly i
00:35:37 --> 00:35:40 don't know if you saw yesterday dennis he was taking jerome powell
00:35:40 --> 00:35:44 the fed chief around on the tour or vice versa powell was taking him on a tour
00:35:44 --> 00:35:48 at these buildings that the fed is doing and trump says at one point like on
00:35:48 --> 00:35:53 camera uh well yeah now it's it's like 3.1 billion dollars and powell like shakes
00:35:53 --> 00:35:58 his head and says no that's false trump takes out a sheet of paper saying, no, it's true.
00:35:58 --> 00:36:01 Look at this. And Paul looks at it and like fact checks him on the spot saying,
00:36:02 --> 00:36:04 no, you're counting something that happened five years ago.
00:36:04 --> 00:36:10 Right. And, and we're so unaccustomed to that, right? Like we just assume Trump just says stuff, right?
00:36:10 --> 00:36:15 And even if it has no basis in objective truth, that's just what he's like.
00:36:16 --> 00:36:21 And, um, I don't mean like he's the first American president who's been dishonest
00:36:21 --> 00:36:23 or something. I'm not that naive.
00:36:23 --> 00:36:27 But I think we just sort of accepted that this is just a different model of
00:36:27 --> 00:36:34 what a democratic executive looks like as someone who is allowed to make unchallenged
00:36:34 --> 00:36:35 claims that are utterly false.
00:36:36 --> 00:36:41 And I think that should be deeply troubling because that just makes any meaningful debate impossible.
00:36:42 --> 00:36:48 If you're not held to any standard like that, how are we supposed to debate
00:36:48 --> 00:36:50 things with each other, right?
00:36:50 --> 00:36:53 How are we supposed to offer critique of something if we can't appeal,
00:36:53 --> 00:36:58 if not to expertise, at least to empirically verifiable sources and say that's false.
00:36:59 --> 00:37:05 So again, that might be getting away from the dual state model that is as Frankl is talking about.
00:37:05 --> 00:37:10 But I think that's a kind of norm that does bother me because I think we used
00:37:10 --> 00:37:12 to at least try to hold presidents accountable to that.
00:37:13 --> 00:37:17 Like, I mean, there's still fact checkers out there. You can look up PolitiFact.
00:37:17 --> 00:37:21 We'll find all sorts of liar, liar pants on fire conclusions about Trump.
00:37:21 --> 00:37:25 But what difference does that even make the discourse? Does that move the needle
00:37:25 --> 00:37:27 in how people view him anymore?
00:37:27 --> 00:37:31 I think that's a problem. I think the clear example of the prerogative state
00:37:31 --> 00:37:36 would be the one we've already alluded to, which is something like the deportation
00:37:36 --> 00:37:41 of undocumented immigrants, but maybe not even of just undocumented immigrants.
00:37:42 --> 00:37:46 I think it was even today The Atlantic ran something about what is the future
00:37:46 --> 00:37:50 of America's 25 million naturalized immigrants, given that the Trump administration
00:37:50 --> 00:37:54 has talked pretty openly about what denaturalization would look like,
00:37:54 --> 00:37:58 given that there are actually at least some anecdotal cases of...
00:37:58 --> 00:38:03 Naturalized immigrants, people with resident status being caught up in these
00:38:03 --> 00:38:06 ICE roundups of undocumented immigrants.
00:38:06 --> 00:38:12 Is there due process for them? I think that's a very clear example that we've
00:38:12 --> 00:38:14 already seen the courts wrestling with.
00:38:15 --> 00:38:20 On the one hand, all American presidents deport undocumented immigrants.
00:38:21 --> 00:38:23 Obama did this to a significant extent. Biden was doing this.
00:38:24 --> 00:38:28 The question, though, is how you do that, right? Like, do you have to show a warrant?
00:38:28 --> 00:38:31 Do you have to, can you be masked, right, as the agent when you're doing that?
00:38:32 --> 00:38:35 And then what kind of due process protections do those people have?
00:38:36 --> 00:38:37 Is that only for citizens?
00:38:37 --> 00:38:42 Is that only for, I mean, are naturalized citizens covered by that?
00:38:43 --> 00:38:47 I mean, I thought generally as a non-expert on this, that the 14th Amendment
00:38:47 --> 00:38:49 applies to anyone who's here, right?
00:38:49 --> 00:38:53 Those are protections that apply to all. and you've
00:38:53 --> 00:38:56 had a lot of federal judges say that and yet in
00:38:56 --> 00:38:58 practice uh how are
00:38:58 --> 00:39:02 those due process protections being applied right how
00:39:02 --> 00:39:05 are people living in this country when they can just be caught up by masked
00:39:05 --> 00:39:10 people who don't have don't show identification and you disappear and you might
00:39:10 --> 00:39:14 even find yourself in a plane to another country right like that i think that's
00:39:14 --> 00:39:17 a very basic one that was probably like really in the air back when huck wrote
00:39:17 --> 00:39:20 his first article back in March and I, I mean,
00:39:20 --> 00:39:24 it's still there, which is probably, it's not the, it's not the front page of news right now.
00:39:25 --> 00:39:30 Well, it's interesting. I don't know if you, I follow every so often. Um.
00:39:32 --> 00:39:36 Christianity Today has been doing some really good journalism about what's going
00:39:36 --> 00:39:38 on with immigrant churches.
00:39:38 --> 00:39:43 And if you want to kind of talk about a dual state is, you know,
00:39:43 --> 00:39:49 most of us go to church, we're not worried that we're going to have mass people
00:39:49 --> 00:39:51 coming up and taking us away.
00:39:52 --> 00:39:55 But that is a concern in a lot of churches,
00:39:56 --> 00:40:01 churches filled with more immigrant churches, whether they're from Iran or from
00:40:01 --> 00:40:03 Venezuela or other places,
00:40:04 --> 00:40:09 they may have been people that have overstayed their visa, but in some cases,
00:40:09 --> 00:40:13 they were actually working with the government to make sure that they're doing
00:40:13 --> 00:40:16 whatever processes are necessary to be legal,
00:40:17 --> 00:40:23 and they end up incarcerated or taken away.
00:40:24 --> 00:40:29 Sometimes, even if they're going just to a hearing to make sure that they are
00:40:29 --> 00:40:32 legal, that they get arrested by ICE.
00:40:34 --> 00:40:38 Another example that I think of the dual state when it comes to churches is,
00:40:38 --> 00:40:43 I don't know if you heard about the Catholic bishop, San Bernardino,
00:40:44 --> 00:40:51 that basically told people to go to his churches that it's okay if they don't
00:40:51 --> 00:40:54 show up because they haven't been showing up because they're afraid if they
00:40:54 --> 00:40:57 do show up, someone will come and take them away.
00:40:59 --> 00:41:03 And those are some of the—I see that as an example of what's going on in our
00:41:03 --> 00:41:09 churches, that there is that sense of a dual state, whereas supposedly the state
00:41:09 --> 00:41:13 has this—tries to have a hands-off role when it comes to religion.
00:41:14 --> 00:41:18 On one hand but then in another place it's like
00:41:18 --> 00:41:21 all bets are off right yeah i
00:41:21 --> 00:41:24 think i mean if i imagine people listening to this who might be skeptical
00:41:24 --> 00:41:27 they would also probably want to point out we're having this discussion right
00:41:27 --> 00:41:30 now right like i'm being very critical of
00:41:30 --> 00:41:33 the administration even daring to suggest we should think
00:41:33 --> 00:41:35 about nazi analogies i don't
00:41:35 --> 00:41:39 really fear that i'm going to lose my job as a result of recording this
00:41:39 --> 00:41:41 interview or writing a substack which you would think
00:41:41 --> 00:41:44 would be um a feature of a dual state
00:41:44 --> 00:41:48 right where all of a sudden protections against
00:41:48 --> 00:41:51 dissent go away and people lose their
00:41:51 --> 00:41:53 freedom their liberty they're deported whatever and
00:41:53 --> 00:41:58 like i'm not sure we're to that point right like at the same time maybe the
00:41:58 --> 00:42:05 other version of this prerogative state that worries me is how the trump administration
00:42:05 --> 00:42:13 is using its legitimate powers as the executive branch in order to punish political opponents, right?
00:42:13 --> 00:42:18 And like, as we record this, the most troubling version of this is having the
00:42:18 --> 00:42:24 director of national intelligence throw out notions that Barack Obama is guilty of treason, right?
00:42:24 --> 00:42:27 And then Donald Trump sharing AI generated footage of Barama being arrested
00:42:27 --> 00:42:29 in the Oval Office, right?
00:42:29 --> 00:42:32 Which seems like very unlikely that that's going to happen.
00:42:34 --> 00:42:39 And yeah, we've seen plenty of examples of political opponents,
00:42:39 --> 00:42:43 if not being locked up, facing other kinds of sanctions, right?
00:42:45 --> 00:42:49 Think about, I guess we probably could talk about Stephen Colbert this week.
00:42:49 --> 00:42:53 I don't know that he's paid an enormously big price, right? Yeah.
00:42:54 --> 00:43:00 He broadcasts for a company that's owned by Paramount, which wants a merger to go through, right?
00:43:00 --> 00:43:04 And it paid millions of dollars in order to settle a dubious legal claim brought
00:43:04 --> 00:43:06 by Trump against 60 Minutes.
00:43:06 --> 00:43:11 And Colbert mocks this and criticizes it. All of a sudden, he's told he's going to be off the air.
00:43:12 --> 00:43:14 Now, this actually might illustrate the dual estate point. Well,
00:43:14 --> 00:43:20 he will not be off the air until next May, right? Because he also has a contract, right?
00:43:20 --> 00:43:24 And CBS couldn't violate that contract. That's still being enforced by the normative state.
00:43:25 --> 00:43:31 And yet, I mean, I do think there are examples of it can be riskier in certain
00:43:31 --> 00:43:34 circumstances, right? I think about this a lot in higher education.
00:43:36 --> 00:43:39 And Columbia University just settled, right, and is going to pay,
00:43:39 --> 00:43:46 what, $200 million to the government because Trump administration yanked away
00:43:46 --> 00:43:49 research grants because of allegations of anti-Semitism,
00:43:49 --> 00:43:54 of ideological indoctrination in certain departments at Columbia.
00:43:54 --> 00:43:58 And I think there is something to that.
00:43:58 --> 00:44:01 I'm not sure the job of the federal government, though, is to start wielding
00:44:01 --> 00:44:07 its power in order to dampen academic freedom and have a say in who gets hired
00:44:07 --> 00:44:11 and when people get fired and what's a legitimate program and what's not a legitimate
00:44:11 --> 00:44:14 program and how students should behave and how they shouldn't behave and professors
00:44:14 --> 00:44:16 should behave and how they shouldn't behave.
00:44:16 --> 00:44:20 I mean, that starts to go pretty close to home for someone like me, right?
00:44:20 --> 00:44:26 And that brings us back to our earlier talk about universities,
00:44:26 --> 00:44:27 especially under the state.
00:44:28 --> 00:44:32 Um germany in the 1930s yeah
00:44:32 --> 00:44:35 yeah and or i mean if you prefer in hungary
00:44:35 --> 00:44:38 which is a really good example right i mean hungary actually had
00:44:38 --> 00:44:44 really well-known universities and i mean the first step that weakened them
00:44:44 --> 00:44:47 is they simply cut funding right because they're all public universities at
00:44:47 --> 00:44:51 least in hungary and then they cut salaries and made them unattractive places
00:44:51 --> 00:44:55 to work and then they started setting up other universities that privileged
00:44:55 --> 00:44:57 a different ideological point of view.
00:44:58 --> 00:45:00 At a certain point, academics just started to leave Hungary.
00:45:01 --> 00:45:05 And so, again, this is where the Nazi analogy falls apart.
00:45:05 --> 00:45:09 I'm not, again, really worried that I'm going to be arrested for what I'm saying.
00:45:09 --> 00:45:13 But I do think the government is putting pressure on institutions.
00:45:14 --> 00:45:18 Not totally dissimilar from the one I work on, that would make it really,
00:45:19 --> 00:45:22 that would at least chill free speech, if not make it illegal, right?
00:45:23 --> 00:45:28 And that would make someone like me think twice about publishing a Substack piece like this, right?
00:45:28 --> 00:45:31 Because I might worry about losing my job and losing the ability to pay my mortgage
00:45:31 --> 00:45:34 and send my kids to college, right? In a couple of years.
00:45:34 --> 00:45:37 Like that's, I guess, where the rubber hits the road for me,
00:45:37 --> 00:45:40 right and and where in a year or two if
00:45:40 --> 00:45:44 this trend continues like i'm not
00:45:44 --> 00:45:49 sure i would agree to come on a podcast like this and talk about it and so again
00:45:49 --> 00:45:53 maybe the very fact that we're having this conversation um should tell me that
00:45:53 --> 00:45:59 my concerns are overstated right and this still remains a free society in which
00:45:59 --> 00:46:03 dissent is very easy to articulate and hear and respond to,
00:46:04 --> 00:46:07 At the same time, I think enough has happened that does make me think there
00:46:07 --> 00:46:10 is something about Frankl's theory that we should be attentive to as Americans,
00:46:10 --> 00:46:14 and we really need, maybe especially as Christians, to say there is nothing
00:46:14 --> 00:46:17 exceptional about the United States.
00:46:17 --> 00:46:22 This has happened to other liberal societies in the past, and it can happen
00:46:22 --> 00:46:26 here, if not exactly in the same way as in the past examples.
00:46:27 --> 00:46:30 Well, that brings me up to where I want to get this to lead.
00:46:30 --> 00:46:33 What does this mean for the church? What does it mean for Christians?
00:46:35 --> 00:46:37 If we're seeing things like this
00:46:37 --> 00:46:42 and there are things that we think are disturbing, what does that mean?
00:46:43 --> 00:46:48 What do we do? I think the first thing we do is we actually talk about it in the church.
00:46:48 --> 00:46:54 I do hold out a lot of hope that the church can be a place where people who disagree.
00:46:55 --> 00:47:00 But share the same love for the same Christ, who share the same gospel,
00:47:01 --> 00:47:05 we should be able to talk about this in ways that maybe it's hard for other
00:47:05 --> 00:47:09 Americans to talk about because of polarization, because of fundamental mistrust
00:47:09 --> 00:47:11 between red states and blue states.
00:47:11 --> 00:47:14 Churches at least to some extent should be
00:47:14 --> 00:47:17 places where there is political and intellectual and
00:47:17 --> 00:47:19 ideological diversity and we should be able to have
00:47:19 --> 00:47:23 conversations right like that's actually a really important thing because
00:47:23 --> 00:47:26 churches also then embody civil society i mean
00:47:26 --> 00:47:31 this is a kind of thing the nazis never were entirely able to control despite
00:47:31 --> 00:47:35 early attempts to create like a reichskirche and then you got the confessing
00:47:35 --> 00:47:39 church response like the church at least to some extent remained apart from
00:47:39 --> 00:47:43 what was called the coordination of German society under the Nazi government
00:47:43 --> 00:47:45 and single-party dictatorship.
00:47:45 --> 00:47:48 And so it is a place where you can have dissenting voices.
00:47:49 --> 00:47:53 And I think that's easier maybe for lay people. Actually, I feel bad for people
00:47:53 --> 00:47:55 like yourself. I think pastors have a really hard time.
00:47:56 --> 00:48:00 I think most pastors in America probably don't want to be preaching,
00:48:00 --> 00:48:03 talking about politics from the pulpit, right?
00:48:03 --> 00:48:06 You don't want to be seen as partisan given the fact that you've got a diverse
00:48:06 --> 00:48:11 congregation. and yet I do think Christians have a responsibility to.
00:48:13 --> 00:48:17 If not our particular system of government, because Christians have lived under
00:48:17 --> 00:48:19 lots of systems of government.
00:48:19 --> 00:48:23 I think we do have a responsibility to something like the truth,
00:48:24 --> 00:48:27 right? I think that's important. I think we have a responsibility to justice.
00:48:27 --> 00:48:32 I think we have a responsibility to love our neighbors and all our neighbors,
00:48:32 --> 00:48:35 not just our family and our immediate neighbors and our fellow Americans,
00:48:35 --> 00:48:39 but especially people who are at risk, right?
00:48:39 --> 00:48:42 I think that's a basic thing Christians should think about right now.
00:48:43 --> 00:48:47 I mean, ever since, I guess, the first Trump administration,
00:48:47 --> 00:48:53 I've come back to passages like 1 Peter 2, where the apostle is thinking about,
00:48:53 --> 00:48:56 so what do Christians actually owe to the Roman Empire?
00:48:57 --> 00:49:01 And Peter says that we're supposed to be subject to the governing authorities.
00:49:01 --> 00:49:06 And I think it's what verse 20 says, fear God, honor the emperor.
00:49:06 --> 00:49:10 And I think often about the tension inherent in that.
00:49:10 --> 00:49:16 I think to a significant extent, you could read New Testament epistles and think
00:49:16 --> 00:49:19 that the message is, well, Christians should be obedient citizens.
00:49:19 --> 00:49:23 They're supposed to pay taxes. They're supposed to pray for the people in power.
00:49:23 --> 00:49:26 They're supposed to be good neighbors, right? They're not antisocial.
00:49:27 --> 00:49:30 They're part of the fabric of society, and they're supposed to be obedient.
00:49:31 --> 00:49:35 But if you read on the next verse, Peter says slaves are supposed to respect
00:49:35 --> 00:49:38 their masters, and maybe especially the ones who don't treat them well.
00:49:38 --> 00:49:42 And I guess that's a kind of version of honoring the emperor,
00:49:42 --> 00:49:43 right, in your own circumstance.
00:49:44 --> 00:49:48 But other Christians have inspired that those of us who are God-fearing maybe
00:49:48 --> 00:49:52 should push back against that kind of secular authority, right?
00:49:52 --> 00:49:55 And eventually, over a long period of time, Christians rethought the nature
00:49:55 --> 00:50:01 of that relationship and decided that it was unjust. And so that's a way in
00:50:01 --> 00:50:05 which maybe norms are something Christians ought to be challenging, right?
00:50:06 --> 00:50:11 At the same time, I generally think the normative state that we have in this
00:50:11 --> 00:50:13 country is one that Christians should largely affirm.
00:50:14 --> 00:50:19 I think that our job is not to honor the emperor in our particular context.
00:50:19 --> 00:50:23 Our job is to honor democracy. Our job is to honor the Constitution.
00:50:23 --> 00:50:27 That's what it means to be a citizen in the way that the Apostle Peter is talking about.
00:50:28 --> 00:50:32 And so I don't think we owe personal fealty to any politician,
00:50:32 --> 00:50:36 first and foremost. I mean, that's a Roman notion that we don't have,
00:50:36 --> 00:50:38 and I'm glad we don't have it.
00:50:39 --> 00:50:43 I do think we ought to play a role as citizens, and we should be unafraid to do that.
00:50:43 --> 00:50:47 I think it starts with simply paying attention, which I think is really hard right now.
00:50:48 --> 00:50:52 I imagine people listening to this, actually, I imagine people looking at the
00:50:52 --> 00:50:55 title of this and the blurb for it and saying, I don't want to think about that.
00:50:56 --> 00:51:00 It's so hard to deal with all of this stuff right now. Like I,
00:51:00 --> 00:51:03 I've had a headache all morning, just thinking about everything we're going
00:51:03 --> 00:51:06 to talk about today. Right. It, it, it makes me uncomfortable.
00:51:06 --> 00:51:08 I want to think about other stuff in my life.
00:51:09 --> 00:51:14 I don't want to read these articles. I don't want to be thinking about Nazi analogies, right?
00:51:14 --> 00:51:18 But I do think it behooves Christians to be good citizens who pay attention to the news,
00:51:19 --> 00:51:24 local, national, international, who are paying attention to a lot of different
00:51:24 --> 00:51:26 perspectives, not just their one favorite,
00:51:27 --> 00:51:33 whether it's Fox or MSNBC or whatever it is, news source, and willing to take
00:51:33 --> 00:51:37 critique seriously and willing to ask hard questions of their leaders, right?
00:51:37 --> 00:51:40 I think that's part of being a good citizen in a democracy.
00:51:42 --> 00:51:45 It's not just showing up to vote every two to four years.
00:51:47 --> 00:51:49 I think it's consuming news. It's
00:51:49 --> 00:51:53 thinking critically. I think that is our responsibility as Christians.
00:51:54 --> 00:51:57 I think it's something non-Christians should do too, but maybe especially here,
00:51:57 --> 00:51:59 I want to say to the church, this is something we ought to do.
00:52:01 --> 00:52:06 What do you think about the role of protest in all of this?
00:52:07 --> 00:52:13 And I always have a, I obviously support people having the right to protest.
00:52:13 --> 00:52:16 I just don't always think it's as effective.
00:52:17 --> 00:52:21 And, you know, you'll see pictures on social media of people who have been at a protest.
00:52:23 --> 00:52:30 But I don't know if it changes anything or if it actually speaks out to those in power.
00:52:30 --> 00:52:34 So I'm kind of curious, what does that mean, especially in this context?
00:52:35 --> 00:52:38 Yeah, I know. No, I mean, this is beyond my ken, really. You'd have to have
00:52:38 --> 00:52:41 a political sign talk about what makes protests effective or ineffective.
00:52:42 --> 00:52:47 I guess I can think of examples from history where at the most effective,
00:52:47 --> 00:52:52 they seem to capture something about the zeitgeist, right, apart from what a
00:52:52 --> 00:52:56 public opinion poll captures or what elections essentially are this kind of
00:52:56 --> 00:52:59 snapshot of what the public thinks in a moment in time.
00:53:00 --> 00:53:04 And so the question is, what do you do apart from those first Tuesday after
00:53:04 --> 00:53:05 the first Monday of November?
00:53:06 --> 00:53:08 Like, I guess protest is a way of doing that, right?
00:53:09 --> 00:53:12 All I can really speak to is I've only gone to a protest once.
00:53:13 --> 00:53:15 It was one of the protests that was organized back in February.
00:53:16 --> 00:53:20 And honestly, now I can't even think about what the organizing theme of the protest was.
00:53:20 --> 00:53:24 I just know that I was one of like 10 people at the Minnesota State Capitol with my wife.
00:53:25 --> 00:53:28 And I remember thinking kind of like two thoughts, like I was kind of hovering
00:53:28 --> 00:53:33 outside of myself watching it thinking, well, on the one hand,
00:53:33 --> 00:53:37 it feels good to know that you're not the only person who's bothered by what's going on.
00:53:37 --> 00:53:40 Right and at a certain point it draws
00:53:40 --> 00:53:43 attention to the fact that this is not normal right
00:53:43 --> 00:53:47 this is not just another debate over like um
00:53:47 --> 00:53:50 is a good idea to regulate what businesses do
00:53:50 --> 00:53:54 for the sake of the environment or does that inhibit free competition and
00:53:54 --> 00:53:56 american prosperity right um what's the
00:53:56 --> 00:54:00 best pathway to immigration reform like at a certain point protest
00:54:00 --> 00:54:03 underscores that something is out of the
00:54:03 --> 00:54:06 norm right and so even very very like.
00:54:06 --> 00:54:10 Suburban middle class white folk like me are
00:54:10 --> 00:54:13 going to go out and stand in the crowd chanting slogans
00:54:13 --> 00:54:16 and the other hand like even there i kind of wondered
00:54:16 --> 00:54:19 so what do we all agree about like there are all sorts of symbols that
00:54:19 --> 00:54:22 i never would have carried um there are
00:54:22 --> 00:54:25 all sorts of causes that i don't think i even agreed with or at
00:54:25 --> 00:54:28 least that i wouldn't have championed and yet they were all coalescing under
00:54:28 --> 00:54:32 this one sort of broad aegis of we're protesting the
00:54:32 --> 00:54:36 trump administration i guess and so
00:54:36 --> 00:54:38 i kind of wonder like if i weren't there what would i think about that would
00:54:38 --> 00:54:42 i just kind of roll my eyes at it would i dismiss it as well this is part of
00:54:42 --> 00:54:47 the problem trump is addressing is a like oh so they all support this one like
00:54:47 --> 00:54:52 palestine or lgbtq equality or like what is the issue they're all complaining
00:54:52 --> 00:54:55 about like like that becomes a problem with protest.
00:54:57 --> 00:55:00 I don't know. Like, I didn't go to the No Kings protests because it happened
00:55:00 --> 00:55:03 to be the same day we had the shootings that I think most people know about
00:55:03 --> 00:55:04 here in Minnesota. Yeah.
00:55:05 --> 00:55:07 And they asked us not to go. But I know people who went.
00:55:08 --> 00:55:12 I know people who went to the John Lewis Day not so long ago.
00:55:12 --> 00:55:14 They wanted to make good trouble, right?
00:55:14 --> 00:55:17 And there are people I wouldn't have expected to go, right?
00:55:17 --> 00:55:21 And one of them even made a kind of Nazi analogy and quoted Martin Niemöller
00:55:21 --> 00:55:23 about, first they came for the Jews, but I wasn't a Jew.
00:55:24 --> 00:55:25 And then they came for the communists, but I was not a communist.
00:55:25 --> 00:55:30 And so they wanted to stand up and be counted. And that meant something to them.
00:55:30 --> 00:55:34 And so I don't know that protest is effective.
00:55:35 --> 00:55:39 I guess I do want to say I understand why people who you might not expect to
00:55:39 --> 00:55:43 be out there carrying signs and chanting might feel compelled to do that.
00:55:43 --> 00:55:47 Because they're not sure how else to sort of demonstrate to their neighbors
00:55:47 --> 00:55:49 something is wrong here.
00:55:49 --> 00:55:52 Right. And simply posting something on social media, I think,
00:55:52 --> 00:55:55 is even less effective at this point. Right. And so what do we do?
00:55:56 --> 00:56:00 Right. Like we can answer if we want to answer a poll, we get something on our
00:56:00 --> 00:56:02 cell phone, we can answer that poll, I guess.
00:56:02 --> 00:56:06 But otherwise, we can wait till midterm elections next year.
00:56:06 --> 00:56:08 Right. That's probably the most important way that if we're discontented,
00:56:08 --> 00:56:12 we can take part in what hopefully are free and fair elections and say,
00:56:12 --> 00:56:14 I don't like this corruption.
00:56:14 --> 00:56:18 And Republicans, you're not dealing with this. And so I'm going to vote in someone else.
00:56:18 --> 00:56:20 That's probably the most effective way you do it in a democracy.
00:56:21 --> 00:56:25 But in between, like, I guess I do wonder, right? Letters to the editor,
00:56:25 --> 00:56:28 does that carry any cachet when news media are so constrained?
00:56:28 --> 00:56:31 Like, I guess I'm just kind of speculating now, Donald.
00:56:33 --> 00:56:40 One question I have, and I go back and forth on this issue, is there are people
00:56:40 --> 00:56:45 who will say, we will get through this.
00:56:47 --> 00:56:50 And there's a part of me that believes that there is a truth to that,
00:56:50 --> 00:56:56 that I don't think that this is necessarily a democracy-ending event.
00:56:59 --> 00:57:07 And yet, there is something in the Hook article in The Atlantic that is interesting
00:57:07 --> 00:57:09 here, and I'll just read it.
00:57:09 --> 00:57:14 It says, yet, as Frankl insisted, it was a mistake to think that even the Nazis
00:57:14 --> 00:57:16 would entirely dispense with normal laws.
00:57:16 --> 00:57:21 After all, they had a complex, broadly capitalist economy to maintain.
00:57:21 --> 00:57:25 A nation of 80 million people, he noted, needed stable rules.
00:57:25 --> 00:57:30 The trick was to find a way to keep the law going for Christian Germans who
00:57:30 --> 00:57:34 supported or at least tolerated the Nazis while ruthlessly executing the furious
00:57:34 --> 00:57:37 directives against the enemies real and perceived.
00:57:38 --> 00:57:44 Capitalism could jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of democracy and even genocide.
00:57:45 --> 00:57:53 And so then I think about what sometimes I see going on, and I don't know if
00:57:53 --> 00:57:55 the question is, we'll get through it. Maybe we will.
00:57:57 --> 00:58:02 But it also seems that at some point,
00:58:04 --> 00:58:07 this type of dual state comes for you.
00:58:09 --> 00:58:13 Maybe not in a way that we have thought about, but it could.
00:58:14 --> 00:58:19 And so then I wonder, maybe the question isn't, will we get through it?
00:58:20 --> 00:58:23 But what do we do now? yeah um
00:58:23 --> 00:58:26 and and so i don't and i you know that's kind
00:58:26 --> 00:58:30 of the question that i keep coming at back at yeah
00:58:30 --> 00:58:32 man that's a good question i mean i guess i want
00:58:32 --> 00:58:36 to say first of all one thing i appreciate about your own substack is
00:58:36 --> 00:58:41 i feel like you call me back from my worst case scenario tendencies right like
00:58:41 --> 00:58:45 you i mean as a good pastor you call me to faithfulness as someone who believes
00:58:45 --> 00:58:50 jesus is still the lord that the resurrection has still happened right like
00:58:50 --> 00:58:53 i mean like and so So in that sense, I even want to say...
00:58:54 --> 00:58:57 Even if this all falls apart, right, it's not the end, right?
00:58:58 --> 00:59:02 I mean, I don't believe it's an apocalypse in that sort of way, right?
00:59:03 --> 00:59:08 But I like democracy. I like the liberal system. I think it is the best of many
00:59:08 --> 00:59:10 bad options. I don't want to see it go away.
00:59:10 --> 00:59:16 And I do think it's true. Like, if you look one more time back at the Nazi case,
00:59:17 --> 00:59:21 like, the Norma estate did not hold up forever, and it kept shrinking, right?
00:59:21 --> 00:59:25 Part of what Frankl himself had to deal with was 1935,
00:59:25 --> 00:59:31 the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped citizenship away from anyone
00:59:31 --> 00:59:36 who had at least one Jewish grandparent and set up sex crimes units to investigate
00:59:36 --> 00:59:38 essentially miscegenation laws.
00:59:38 --> 00:59:43 And it became then the legal basis for everything that then happened, right?
00:59:43 --> 00:59:46 Whether it was taking property away, taking jobs away, excluding people from
00:59:46 --> 00:59:51 civil rights, throwing them in concentration camps, deportations that ended
00:59:51 --> 00:59:52 up being extermination.
00:59:53 --> 00:59:56 I mean, that was a way in which that was ostensibly the normative state, right?
00:59:56 --> 01:00:02 This is what the war crimes defendants counsel. This is what they argue at Nuremberg, right?
01:00:02 --> 01:00:07 They didn't violate any German law because the Nuremberg laws had redefined citizenship. show.
01:00:08 --> 01:00:12 And so I haven't read Frankl's actual book in a while, but like,
01:00:12 --> 01:00:13 I kind of wonder what he said about that.
01:00:13 --> 01:00:19 Cause that's a way in which over time, the prerogative state was actually normalizing
01:00:19 --> 01:00:23 and the rule of law at a certain point became no protection.
01:00:24 --> 01:00:26 Um, and then the other big thing is just world war two happened.
01:00:27 --> 01:00:31 Right. And in a sense that was baked into Nazism from the start as well.
01:00:31 --> 01:00:35 And that eventually came for all Germans, right. Up to the point at the very
01:00:35 --> 01:00:38 end where the SS was shooting anyone
01:00:38 --> 01:00:41 who wouldn't take a gun to fight the Russians, right, in May of 1945.
01:00:42 --> 01:00:45 Like, at a certain point, I'm not sure the dual state is sustainable.
01:00:47 --> 01:00:53 And unless people stand up toward the normative state and ask why do these prerogatives exist.
01:00:55 --> 01:00:58 I mean, what's going to prop it up? I mean, I think we'd like to think,
01:00:58 --> 01:01:00 well, that's why the judiciary is there, right?
01:01:01 --> 01:01:06 Who knows whether this is normal or not? Let's let a judge decide and eventually
01:01:06 --> 01:01:08 we let the Supreme Court decide.
01:01:08 --> 01:01:14 But the Supreme Court has carved out a lot of space for the executive to act
01:01:14 --> 01:01:19 as it wants to act, which I think would be surprising given, like, I mean...
01:01:20 --> 01:01:23 Conservatives i know from when i teach the cold war class hated
01:01:23 --> 01:01:26 the idea of this massive executive unified branch
01:01:26 --> 01:01:29 right i think robert taft the ohio republican senator
01:01:29 --> 01:01:32 who was worried that fdr's new
01:01:32 --> 01:01:36 deal and then harry truman's national security state was creating an imperial
01:01:36 --> 01:01:41 presidency right and and nowadays like it's entirely flipped and it's conservative
01:01:41 --> 01:01:46 saying we need this powerful executive in order to enact the policies we want
01:01:46 --> 01:01:49 of course it's different once you're in power It is, yeah.
01:01:50 --> 01:01:53 And I don't know if I'm being even fair to the Supreme Court,
01:01:53 --> 01:01:56 again, partly because I'm not a legal scholar, but also because so many of the
01:01:56 --> 01:02:01 rulings we've seen recently from SCOTUS, kind of these emergency docket things
01:02:01 --> 01:02:03 that don't have any sort of explanation.
01:02:03 --> 01:02:06 But then there's a dissent from someone like Sotomayor on the left,
01:02:06 --> 01:02:09 right, warning about essentially what we're talking about, right?
01:02:09 --> 01:02:15 We're kind of seeing the slow motion rollback of democratic norms and protections against violations.
01:02:15 --> 01:02:19 At a certain point, the rule of law creates all sorts of space,
01:02:19 --> 01:02:21 and it really isn't even a prerogative anymore.
01:02:21 --> 01:02:26 It's just the norms have changed, and we just are accustomed to a world in which
01:02:26 --> 01:02:31 unidentified agents can arrest you and there's no due process protecting you.
01:02:31 --> 01:02:35 And right now, that's something that our neighbors who are undocumented immigrants
01:02:35 --> 01:02:38 and maybe naturalized citizens have to worry about.
01:02:39 --> 01:02:42 I worry what that's going to look like in five years, right?
01:02:42 --> 01:02:45 I mean, what's interesting to me, this was a lawfare article a while back,
01:02:46 --> 01:02:49 is that on the one hand, I mean, I think Trump is doing what I think a lot of
01:02:49 --> 01:02:54 conservatives and a lot of his voters want, which is to roll back the size and cost of government.
01:02:55 --> 01:02:59 Except that there are other parts of the administration that are getting vastly bigger.
01:02:59 --> 01:03:04 I mean, ICE is the classic example of that, but also the defense department,
01:03:04 --> 01:03:10 parts of the judicial department, like things that enforce the will of the executive
01:03:10 --> 01:03:12 branch are getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
01:03:12 --> 01:03:14 And I think that should be troubling
01:03:14 --> 01:03:16 to people who are worried about the kind of things that worry us.
01:03:18 --> 01:03:19 At a certain point.
01:03:20 --> 01:03:25 We really should be worried about a Justice Department that is not avowedly nonpartisan.
01:03:26 --> 01:03:31 Anything that makes us wonder, is the Justice Department actually upholding
01:03:31 --> 01:03:37 the rule of law, or is it acting as an arm of the president for his personal
01:03:37 --> 01:03:40 and or partisan purposes, that really should be concerning.
01:03:40 --> 01:03:44 Like, for example, this week, the Justice Department announced investigation
01:03:44 --> 01:03:47 of the United Health Group here in town, which is this massive Fortune 500 our
01:03:47 --> 01:03:52 company, and it's being investigated for possibility of Medicare fraud, right?
01:03:53 --> 01:03:56 And I guess I look at that and listen, and most of me thinks,
01:03:56 --> 01:03:58 well, yeah, I mean, that's what it should be doing.
01:03:58 --> 01:04:02 I mean, like, this does happen, right? And there's this huge pot of money,
01:04:02 --> 01:04:07 and people skirt the law in order to maximize how much money they get out of Medicare.
01:04:07 --> 01:04:10 Like, that doesn't surprise me. We're dealing with other kinds of fraud in the
01:04:10 --> 01:04:11 state of Minnesota right now.
01:04:12 --> 01:04:14 And that's probably something the Justice Department should investigate.
01:04:14 --> 01:04:16 That's the normative state doing its job.
01:04:17 --> 01:04:20 But then there's a little bit of me wondering, is there anything else behind
01:04:20 --> 01:04:23 that? And like, why are they investigating UnitedHealth Group, right?
01:04:23 --> 01:04:27 Like, that's what I start to worry about is, I don't want to be in the place
01:04:27 --> 01:04:31 where I start to not trust even what the Justice Department is doing.
01:04:32 --> 01:04:36 Um i mean that's just my privilege like as you've alluded to for a long time
01:04:36 --> 01:04:41 uh um african americans for example a good reason to be suspicious of what a
01:04:41 --> 01:04:44 police and law enforcement officials and judges were doing,
01:04:45 --> 01:04:50 but i think that's maybe starting to come for for other americans too uh and
01:04:50 --> 01:04:55 we should start worrying what if it's being used as simply um.
01:04:56 --> 01:05:02 The fist, right, of an increasingly powerful president who wields his own prerogatives.
01:05:02 --> 01:05:07 And if we really want to be alarmist, and this touches on my other big field,
01:05:07 --> 01:05:10 which is military history, anything that seems to politicize the U.S.
01:05:10 --> 01:05:14 Military really ought to set off just like lots of alarm bells for any American.
01:05:15 --> 01:05:18 And we're probably not there yet, but there have been enough small versions
01:05:18 --> 01:05:24 of that this year that you hear a lot of people in and outside the military starting to worry.
01:05:26 --> 01:05:31 Yeah, yeah. There's an article that was written by Tom Nichols that was also
01:05:31 --> 01:05:38 in The Atlantic about how women are kind of getting kind of cut out.
01:05:38 --> 01:05:42 They're not necessarily being forced to leave the military, but they're given
01:05:42 --> 01:05:46 a lower role. I've seen that happen also among persons of color.
01:05:49 --> 01:05:54 I think kind of like you, the word like you said about genocide when I said
01:05:54 --> 01:05:58 earlier about fascism, the word racism sometimes get tossed out way too much in our culture.
01:06:00 --> 01:06:07 But I also think one aspect of what I see happening right now is racial.
01:06:08 --> 01:06:14 And I can't ignore that. I don't know how to talk about that without it sounding
01:06:14 --> 01:06:17 like I'm just kind of alarmist or that people just won't listen,
01:06:18 --> 01:06:20 but it's also disturbing.
01:06:20 --> 01:06:27 And maybe because of my own, knowing my history of African-American history
01:06:27 --> 01:06:29 is just like, this doesn't sound good.
01:06:31 --> 01:06:35 Yeah, I think that's a very complicated part of this picture,
01:06:35 --> 01:06:39 and I probably don't have a lot to say except to point out, what do we make
01:06:39 --> 01:06:42 of that when the New York Times this week ran an article about the multiracial
01:06:42 --> 01:06:46 right, and Trump support going up with African,
01:06:46 --> 01:06:48 Asian-American, Latino, right?
01:06:48 --> 01:06:52 Like, I think the supporters would probably want to throw that back and say,
01:06:52 --> 01:06:57 no, we're pushing back against a certain kind of racial justice.
01:06:57 --> 01:07:02 Right. And that's something I really worry about, because I can see that happening
01:07:02 --> 01:07:05 in the church in higher education. Right.
01:07:05 --> 01:07:08 Like, I think there are legitimate critiques of DEI.
01:07:08 --> 01:07:11 There are as right like i mean i keep
01:07:11 --> 01:07:14 mentioning new york times atlantic but like they had this long piece about the
01:07:14 --> 01:07:17 university of michigan and kind of waning days the bide
01:07:17 --> 01:07:20 administration that really did raise concerns about just the like size
01:07:20 --> 01:07:25 of the kind of bureaucracy for it and what it was doing to research at the same
01:07:25 --> 01:07:28 time like i really appreciate i'm at a christian institution that takes really
01:07:28 --> 01:07:33 seriously what we call inclusive excellence right and i think that's a difficult
01:07:33 --> 01:07:37 space to be right now in a broadly evangelical context to say,
01:07:37 --> 01:07:42 like, we really want to look like a Revelation 7-9 vision of the kingdom of
01:07:42 --> 01:07:44 God, and we're not there yet.
01:07:44 --> 01:07:49 And so what do we do to not just recruit students and faculty and staff of color,
01:07:49 --> 01:07:52 but actually to treat them well, to make them feel like they're fully part of
01:07:52 --> 01:07:54 the community, because that's not how they've always felt.
01:07:55 --> 01:07:59 I don't want to just suspend that initiative because DEI
01:07:59 --> 01:08:02 is this word that can be thrown now to uh make
01:08:02 --> 01:08:06 constituents really nervous about what we're doing i that's something
01:08:06 --> 01:08:09 i guess i'm kind of on tender hooks about moving forward
01:08:09 --> 01:08:17 in my in my space yeah and there was actually the story this week about a congressman
01:08:17 --> 01:08:22 in tennessee that wants to go after belmont yes you heard about that and that
01:08:22 --> 01:08:28 was just kind of like oh that's that's disturbing um so,
01:08:28 --> 01:08:31 So, well, I'm that happy, though.
01:08:36 --> 01:08:41 If people want to know more about and read more about things,
01:08:41 --> 01:08:45 whether it's not just a dual state, but other things on your Substack, where should they go?
01:08:45 --> 01:08:50 Yeah, it's hard to spell, but I'll say it. It's chrisgeertz.substack.com.
01:08:50 --> 01:08:53 The hard word there is Geertz. It's G-E-H-R-Z.
01:08:53 --> 01:08:56 Or just Google Pietist Schoolman. That's also hard to spell.
01:08:56 --> 01:08:59 Pietist is P-I-E-T-I-S-T.
01:09:00 --> 01:09:02 This is why I'm not in marketing. It's a terrible brand.
01:09:03 --> 01:09:06 I mean, I also say that, worried that people are going to get there and be kind
01:09:06 --> 01:09:09 of disappointed because you're not going to find me writing about this all the time.
01:09:09 --> 01:09:13 Although I would say it's probably in the background of at least a decent amount
01:09:13 --> 01:09:17 of what I'm writing about. Well, I was going to say, because a lot of your thing is history.
01:09:18 --> 01:09:21 And, you know, if you're paying attention, you can see,
01:09:23 --> 01:09:26 the parallels, or at least whereas the old saying goes where history can rhyme.
01:09:27 --> 01:09:30 That's true. Yeah, it does. But I want to say before we go, Dennis,
01:09:30 --> 01:09:33 I really appreciate you giving me the chance just to talk through some of this
01:09:33 --> 01:09:38 stuff because I really like, it's partly the function of like it's summer break.
01:09:38 --> 01:09:41 So I don't have my colleagues around to like process stuff with.
01:09:41 --> 01:09:45 I don't have my political science colleagues in our department who I can kind
01:09:45 --> 01:09:46 of ask these questions of.
01:09:46 --> 01:09:49 So I just appreciate having a conversation with someone who's
01:09:49 --> 01:09:53 wise and thoughtful and pastoral because
01:09:53 --> 01:09:56 partly i just need to like say these things aloud and i
01:09:56 --> 01:09:58 don't like i like to use my blog for what i call thinking in
01:09:58 --> 01:10:02 public i don't want to use it just for these questions and
01:10:02 --> 01:10:04 so it actually even though it gave me a headache it was
01:10:04 --> 01:10:07 really helpful just to have an hour to kind of talk through this six months into
01:10:07 --> 01:10:11 this trump presidency and i don't even know if i've been right about half this
01:10:11 --> 01:10:16 stuff i just like need to say it and and think through it and then ruminate
01:10:16 --> 01:10:20 on some more but i appreciate having the space the invitation to talk about
01:10:20 --> 01:10:26 it I'm glad we were able to have this forum for that as well and I'm hoping,
01:10:27 --> 01:10:33 maybe in some time that we can come back to talk a little bit more and hopefully
01:10:33 --> 01:10:37 things will be better I think we should be people of hope if nothing else right?
01:10:38 --> 01:10:44 Exactly Alright well thank you so much and take care Thanks Taz Music.
01:10:45 --> 01:11:14 Music.
01:11:14 --> 01:11:18 So, as always, I would love to hear your thoughts on the episode.
01:11:18 --> 01:11:24 You can do that by leaving an email at churchandmain at substack.com.
01:11:24 --> 01:11:33 The link is in the show notes, so click on the description, and you'll find
01:11:33 --> 01:11:34 the link there to send an email.
01:11:35 --> 01:11:41 I will also include links to Aziz Hook's article in The Atlantic,
01:11:41 --> 01:11:45 as well as Chris Gertz's Substack article as well.
01:11:46 --> 01:11:53 And I also will put a link to the book, The Dual State, if people would like to read it.
01:11:54 --> 01:12:04 So I want to take a few moments as the podcast hosts, kind of to take podcast hosts prerogative.
01:12:05 --> 01:12:08 And I want to actually focus on that last word, prerogative,
01:12:08 --> 01:12:10 because that's what I want to talk about.
01:12:11 --> 01:12:15 When I think about that word, I actually think about being a sophomore in college
01:12:15 --> 01:12:17 at Michigan State University.
01:12:17 --> 01:12:21 And because around that time was when the song My Prerogative by Bobby Brown
01:12:21 --> 01:12:22 came out, it topped the charts.
01:12:22 --> 01:12:28 It's a slamming song, still great, some 30, almost 40 years later.
01:12:29 --> 01:12:32 It's a song where Brown is basically talking about being able to do what he
01:12:32 --> 01:12:33 wants to do. He's an adult.
01:12:34 --> 01:12:39 He should be able to do, no one should be able to tell him what he needs to do.
01:12:40 --> 01:12:46 Now, the definition of the word prerogative is an exclusive or special right, power, or privilege.
01:12:47 --> 01:12:51 Now, when Christopher and I were talking, we talked about those two different
01:12:51 --> 01:12:57 states that make up the dual state, the normative state, and the prerogative state.
01:12:58 --> 01:13:01 And the prerogative state is not as fun as a Bobby Brown song.
01:13:02 --> 01:13:06 It's a state where someone has the exclusive right to rule.
01:13:08 --> 01:13:12 That person is not me, and it's not Bobby Brown. It's the president.
01:13:14 --> 01:13:21 I don't need to go into all of the things, but when Aziz Hook wrote this article
01:13:21 --> 01:13:24 in March, there were some things that were disturbing.
01:13:26 --> 01:13:32 When Chris Gertz wrote his article in July, there were more things that were disturbing.
01:13:33 --> 01:13:40 And even within the last few weeks, we've seen things that are even more disturbing
01:13:40 --> 01:13:44 that just are unsettling and sometimes,
01:13:45 --> 01:13:50 i don't know about you if you're reading things can put you in a funk,
01:13:52 --> 01:13:56 one of the things we talked about as we finished up our conversation uh that
01:13:56 --> 01:14:00 i had with chris is we talked about what was going on and this is also picked
01:14:00 --> 01:14:03 up There's an article about it in Thinking Christianity Today,
01:14:04 --> 01:14:07 about Belmont University. It's an evangelical college in Nashville.
01:14:07 --> 01:14:14 It's being basically hectored by a Republican congressperson because they want
01:14:14 --> 01:14:17 to try to be a diverse college.
01:14:19 --> 01:14:25 And there are other things that I could talk about that just are very disturbing.
01:14:28 --> 01:14:34 These are all examples of an American prerogative state that seems to be coming to fore.
01:14:35 --> 01:14:41 And it seems to be coming down hard on anyone who isn't in the president's good graces.
01:14:41 --> 01:14:44 And as I said before, it's all very disturbing.
01:14:45 --> 01:14:49 Now, do I think that this is leading to the end of American democracy?
01:14:51 --> 01:14:56 I'd like to not think so. I think that the way that American democracy is set
01:14:56 --> 01:15:04 up and the way that America is set up, it's a little hard to destroy us.
01:15:05 --> 01:15:10 German democracy was very fragile when Hitler came to power.
01:15:11 --> 01:15:13 That's very different from America. know.
01:15:15 --> 01:15:20 But saying that I'm not, I don't think it's a possibility, it's not the same
01:15:20 --> 01:15:24 as saying that there's zero chance.
01:15:24 --> 01:15:26 I think there is a non-zero chance.
01:15:27 --> 01:15:33 And the fact is, even if we make it through these next few years with American
01:15:33 --> 01:15:37 democracy intact, it will also be with a lot of damage.
01:15:38 --> 01:15:43 Damage to American institutions, damage to American reputations,
01:15:44 --> 01:15:50 to the reputation of America, and damage to actual American lives.
01:15:52 --> 01:15:57 As I said, this all feels scary, uncertain.
01:15:57 --> 01:15:58 You could even hear about it
01:15:58 --> 01:16:03 in some of the uncertainty that Chris was exhibiting in the conversation.
01:16:04 --> 01:16:09 And I will be honest that there is a lot of uncertainty in even saying all of this.
01:16:12 --> 01:16:18 Now, as a Christian, I've taken last week's guest, Amy Montravati's advice to heart.
01:16:19 --> 01:16:25 I talked a lot about how do you deal—she once talked about that she tries not
01:16:25 --> 01:16:27 to focus as much on the news.
01:16:27 --> 01:16:30 She doesn't ignore the news, but she doesn't focus as much on the news.
01:16:30 --> 01:16:37 And one of the things that she does is that she focuses on doing morning prayer
01:16:37 --> 01:16:40 every morning. And she uses the Book of Common Prayer.
01:16:41 --> 01:16:47 And one of the things that I heard about that and I started to I ordered actually
01:16:47 --> 01:16:53 for myself a week and a half ago or so the Presbyterian version of the Book
01:16:53 --> 01:16:55 of Cotton Prayer it's just simply called Daily Prayer.
01:16:57 --> 01:17:01 And the fact is I look forward to getting to the place where we read the canticles
01:17:01 --> 01:17:06 and there are different canticles from the Bible but especially Mary's Magnificat,
01:17:07 --> 01:17:13 and I have to remind myself that No matter how much the prerogative state advances,
01:17:13 --> 01:17:21 and from all news reports, it will advance, and it will affect all of us, you and I.
01:17:23 --> 01:17:27 I place trust in the God that brings down the mighty, as Mary says.
01:17:29 --> 01:17:36 That actually gives me hope. I'm not looking forward or wishing for bad things
01:17:36 --> 01:17:42 for the president But what I'm trying to say is that When there are rules and
01:17:42 --> 01:17:44 things that are unjust Unjust governments,
01:17:45 --> 01:17:47 They don't last.
01:17:50 --> 01:17:55 God does bring those unjust governments down They end,
01:17:58 --> 01:18:03 And as I said, that does give me hope. But that does not mean that we won't be left unscathed.
01:18:05 --> 01:18:11 Because as I said before, the prerogative state will come for you and for I in time.
01:18:12 --> 01:18:20 It's going to come for all of us because its nature is to want more and more a civic society.
01:18:22 --> 01:18:26 But even in a time of trial, God has not left us.
01:18:27 --> 01:18:30 And we know that the unjust can't rule forever.
01:18:32 --> 01:18:37 As the old saying goes, I believe that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not.
01:18:38 --> 01:18:44 And that means that no president, no king, no matter who they are,
01:18:44 --> 01:18:50 no matter what party they belong to, can take over the role of Jesus Christ as Lord.
01:18:53 --> 01:18:58 So the next few years are going to be challenging. I think that we are,
01:18:58 --> 01:19:03 as Americans, and especially we as American Christians, are going to see things
01:19:03 --> 01:19:06 that we have not seen before.
01:19:08 --> 01:19:16 I'm reminded a few weeks ago, CNN interviewed a young Presbyterian who is a
01:19:16 --> 01:19:19 state senator, a Democratic state senator in Texas, James Tallarico.
01:19:20 --> 01:19:23 And she talked about the fact that you know the democratic party
01:19:23 --> 01:19:26 was looking for a savior someone that was going to
01:19:26 --> 01:19:33 help their electoral fortunes tariko as i said is a presbyterian he's actually
01:19:33 --> 01:19:41 studying to become a minister um at a seminary in austin texas and he he started
01:19:41 --> 01:19:45 his um response by simply saying this,
01:19:46 --> 01:19:48 I already have a savior.
01:19:50 --> 01:19:54 And I think that that is something that we, all of us need to be mindful of.
01:19:56 --> 01:20:01 Our savior is not going to be someone from
01:20:01 --> 01:20:08 washington whether they're a republican or a democrat in some ways i think that's
01:20:08 --> 01:20:13 why we're in the mess we are in because we're looking for saviors and we already
01:20:13 --> 01:20:20 have one one who came as a child one who lived among us as a simple carpenter,
01:20:20 --> 01:20:25 and one who was put to death by the state.
01:20:26 --> 01:20:33 We also know that one also defeated death and rules.
01:20:35 --> 01:20:39 That is the hope that we have to live with.
01:20:40 --> 01:20:45 In fact, that's all the hope right now that we can live with.
01:20:48 --> 01:20:52 If you want to learn more about this podcast, listen to past episodes,
01:20:52 --> 01:20:57 or donate, check us out at churchinmaine.org.
01:20:58 --> 01:21:05 You can also visit us at churchinmaine.substack.com to read related articles.
01:21:05 --> 01:21:11 I have a new one up that's entitled, What to Do When Your President is Racist.
01:21:12 --> 01:21:15 I'll put the link in the show notes, give it a read.
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01:21:33 --> 01:21:36 That is it for this episode of Church in Maine.
01:21:37 --> 01:21:41 Thank you so much for listening. Pass this episode along to family and friends
01:21:41 --> 01:21:42 who might be interested.
01:21:43 --> 01:21:52 I'm Dennis Sanders, your host Take care Godspeed And I will see you very soon.
01:21:52 --> 01:22:20 Music.