Lucretia, looking typically unconvinced by one of Steve’s arguments.

This week’s episode, recorded with a live audience on Zoom, was off the hook a little more than usual, as Lucretia was in a grumpy mood (despite Steve changing up his whisky selection in a futile attempt at appeasement), and audience questions and comments came flying in fast and furious. Yet somehow we managed to cover a lot of territory, from an after-action report on this year’s Indigenous Peoples Day Columbus Day holiday, to some new perspectives in the “voting irregularities” of the 2020 election, to the glories of Popeye’s fried chicken, which apparently triggers the snowflakes at Yale Law School.

This week’s episode is sans-guests and sans-metaphysics, as Lucretia and Steve kick around the news of the week, which is a mix of the usual ominous portents from Washington, along with some evidence that Democrats are in free-fall with the public.

First up is a look at the egregious Department of Justice letter identifying parents protesting at local school board meetings as a threat to the regime (in an ironic way, the DoJ is right!), wondering just what the federal question under the law is, and noting how this step certifies the open contempt Washington has for local self-government (thank you for your candor Terry McAuliffe!). Then we look at the Ezra Klein NY Times article about Democratic data-maven David Shor, who is trying to warn Democrats that the public is swifty turning against them. Steve offers some historical perspective to show how insane Democrats are in thinking they can govern the country as though they had the same kind of huge and durable majorities that FDR and LBJ had once upon a time.

Steve’s happy place!

Steve returns as host this week, and after some of the ritual lover’s quarrel over whisky (including a celebration of Steve’s happy place—see nearby pic), Steve and Lucretia get down to the main business, which is slagging the left, and taking on the problem of “scientific expertise” in modern government.

Lucretia assumes hosting duties for this week’s potpourri of a show because Steve is recovering from major surgery, which he relates at the show opening today. (It includes a theological dimension!) But while Steve is improving, the recall effort against California Gov. Gavin Newsom appears not to be. Steve explains the reasons why the polls show a strong turnaround in Newsom’s favor over the last week to 10 days, and why Larry Elder’s campaign has not been as effective as it could be.

From there Steve and Lucretia share their own reminiscences of the morning of 20 years ago—Steve from just three blocks away from the White House, and Lucretia over in Europe—and then answer the question: are we better off than we were 20 years ago? The answers are less than reassuring. President Biden’s absence from a public speaking role today underscores the problem that is getting more difficult for the White House to conceal with every passing day: the man isn’t up to the job. And that’s even more worrying that the larger geopolitical scene of the moment, which is distinctly more ominous than it was 20 years ago.

This week’s episode is a Biden-free zone, so if you’re looking to avoid the Biden-Afghan collapse story, this is the show for you.

Instead we decided to circle back return to an argument Steve was losing badly at the end of last week’s episode with Michael Anton, and go into greater depth on the meaning of equality in American political thought. To recap, Steve argued that the critics of “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence—from Tocqueville to today’s “paleoconservatives”—have a point, at least historically considered, and that the simple and laudatory instinct of Americans that “you are not the boss of me” is insufficient and prone to the defects of cognitive dissonance.

Lucretia takes over hosting duties for this episode (which seems only truth-in-advertising, since most listeners think she is charge every week), as we contemplate the question: wouldn’t it be nice if we actually had two political parties? We use as our text for the subject one of Harry Jaffa’s earliest essays, “The Nature and Origin of the American Party System,” where he explains why at its core party competition at crucial moments presents a fundamental choice between conflicting understandings of the nation’s core principles.

As Jaffa puts it in a bracing paragraph early in the essay:

We’re back! After a hiatus for a week while Steve was overseas, we return to the bar with some new whiskies and a sequel to our last episode that talked about the hysterical attacks on our friends at the Claremont Institute. Little did we know the liberal hysteria was just getting started!

Damon Linker, the columnist at The Week and a previous guest on this podcast, thinks our Claremont friends are going all-in for dictatorship. This seems a bit overwrought, but it provides a good occasion for a genuine example of “Caesarism” in the form of Franklin Roosevelt and especially his imperious and authoritarian First Inaugural Address. Most people recall only one famous line from the speech—”We have nothing to fear but fear itself” (did FDR’s speechwriters actually get this from a newspaper ad? We review the evidence). Much less recalled are FDR’s multiple references to how the American people needed and wanted “discipline,” and that he was more than ready to be the disciplinarian, especially if Congress didn’t step up and grant him the extraordinary powers he wanted.

Steve figured a nine time zone distance might provide a margin of safety from Lucretia’s rear-end kicking over Steve’s article “What the Hell Happened to Bill Kristol?“, which Lucretia finds sorely wanting. And his attempts to mollify Lucretia with tales of how great Hungary’s conservatives are was mostly unavailing, even if true.

Anyway, in this slightly abbreviated episode (because Steve had to rush off to begin a typical Central European Saturday night of drinks and dinner over a four hour period), we quickly strafe the Biden Administration for its shredding of Trump’s foreign policy achievements, with the partial exception of the Afghan pullout, which we support because of the comprehensive failure of our politico-military establishment ever to come up with a serious plan to win.

Once upon a time, “CRT” stood for “cathode ray tube,” sometimes known as “television,” but also oscilloscopes, computer screens, some x-rays, and certain other technical devices designed for testing and calibration. Cathode ray tubes went the way of the Dodo bird quite some time ago, and nowadays CRT means something else: Critical Race Theory.

There is one way in which today’s CRT resembles the old tech CRTs—they both depend on a vacuum. Critical Race Theory depends on the vacuum of nihilism at the end of the day, as a close look at the most academic variants show. By listener demand, Steve and Lucretia explore the origins of CRT in law schools 40 years ago, try to separate the sense (a little) from the nonsense (a lot, most of it pernicious).