Civilization and the Faculty Lounge
Ludwig von Mises is one of my heroes. He abided by a fundamental principle in life: "Never give an inch."
It was often said by Chicago School economists and other non-Austrian economists that Mises was just too hard core. He was just too unbending. For an example of this criticism, watch this brief video, which is a segment from the PBS series, The Commanding Heights. The key comes at 1:30: an interview with Milton Friedman. Friedman dismisses Mises for standing firm. But on the issue at hand -- the welfare state -- he was right.
At the age of 19, I read Hayek's Constitution of Liberty (1960). I got to Chapter 19, "Social Security." It is a defense of social welfare laws in the name of liberty. I realized then that the man really was compromised intellectually.
Hayek won the Nobel Prize in 1974, one year after Mises died. Hayek had made his reputation in England in the 1930's by taking Mises' theory of the business cycle, adding a couple of simple charts, and giving Mises some footnotes. His deservedly famous 1945 essay on "The Use of Knowledge in Society" is an extension of Mises' 1920 essay, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." By the time he won the Nobel Prize, the academic world had long refused admit that Hayek's major work in economics was little more than a development of the intransigent Mises. The University of Chicago's economics department did understand this, and so it blackballed him in 1950, refusing to hire him because the did not like his methodology, i.e., his Austrianism, which he got from Mises. Another department hired him, and an outside agency -- the Volker Fund -- paid his salary. (This is covered in Brian Doherty's book, Radicals for Capitalism.)
Mises was right for 60 years, in terms of both content and form. His critics were wrong. Mises had the goods from 1912 until his death in 1973. His critics sold out whenever it was convenient. He never did. Neither did his disciple, Murray Rothbard. Mises maintained his position, and fought for his position, almost alone, for his entire career. His influence today is greater than it could ever have been if he had been just one more nice guy in the faculty lounge. Fortunately, he never spent much time in the faculty lounge. He didn't even get a salary at New York University. That was paid for by donors, including the Volker Fund. He was ridiculed by his colleagues. He was regarded as a dinosaur. Some of them recommended to students that they not attend Mises' seminar. Yet nobody remembers the names of any of his faculty colleagues today. A lot of people remember his. Mises.org has the traffic to prove this.
Mises was never a member in good standing in any faculty lounge. He was correctly perceived as an outsider.
There has never been a social transformation that began inside a faculty lounge.
WHEN THE STAKES ARE HIGH
A Misesian friend of mine sent me a link to a recent article written by one of my critics. I don't need to narrow it down. When I refer to "one of my critics," this does not narrow it down. It is more like "needle in a haystack."
The article appears in a neoconservative magazine. Yet the author is a supporter of the standard welfare state. I am not sure that the editor knows this, so bland has the author been. He signed this document. But the editor could not resist running a hatchet job on me. "The enemy of my enemy," etc. It was a hatchet job, not on my views, but on my tactics. And, I am pleased to say, it is on target. It says that I do not enter into debate with a spirit of shared inquiry.
The author is a theologian. He has spent his career writing bland books and raising millions of dollars for a bland educational institution.
He writes about an incident that took place over 35 years ago. I debated him. I remember the debate. I don't remember meeting him before the debate. He remembers having met me. He apparently does not remember the debate. He does not mention the topic.
I recall that in his main presentation, he said that he was looking forward to heaven, where he would have time to read the works of Karl Marx. Because I had already done this to write my book, Marx's Religion of Revolution (1968), I commented in my rebuttal that I would much prefer spending time in heaven studying the works of Dolly Parton. I figured the audience would side with me. I was right. The debate was in Mississippi, and the audience was 90% male.
He quoted a hymn that he said his mother loved: "I'd rather have Jesus than silver and gold." I responded by saying that that I'd rather have Jesus and silver and gold.
For him, as for most Ph.D.-holding clerics and clerks, the ideological battles of life must be subordinate to making your opponents feel nice. I have never believed this.
At the time that I debated him, he taught at an institution that systematically promoted the social gospel in the name of Calvinism, although its typically naive donors did not know. It had a blackout on free market economics. That blackout has remained in force. When the son of a major donor asked 15 years ago to let me give one lecture at the on-campus research center that had been funded by his millionaire father, and which bears his father's name, he was brushed off. I had told him this would happen. He thought I was exaggerating. He learned.
My critic expected a "hail fellow, well met" response from me. He did not get it.
He later went onto the faculty another theological institution that has a faculty made up of a wide range of Protestants -- so wide, that theological liberals have cooperated with it for half a century. He was not only on its payroll; he ran it. It is what it is because he raised the funds to make it what it is. It is a theologically squishy school that has been squishy for over 50 years. It is neo-evangelical, but trusting fundamentalists naively put up the seed money two generations ago. It adopted big-tent evangelicalism, figuratively speaking. (Actually, one of its promoters did get his start in a big tent. But he soon outgrew it.)
Fact: big-tent movements are blown away when the ideological whirlwind hits.
When a man makes his income by raising millions of dollars for an organization that is opposed to what he says he believes -- Calvinism -- and then he comes back almost 40 years later to claim that he has never deviated from the position that he claims he holds, you can be pretty certain that he is squishy. He has a view of himself which is out of touch with reality. He defines himself and his work in terms of an illusion. His work contradicts his confession. His walk contradicts his talk.
I did not respect him 40 years ago, and I respect him less today. I think he sensed this back then. The incident has stuck in his craw. He remembers that I did not take him seriously. This bothers academics. They expect to be taken seriously because they went through a series of academic hoops that were set up in the late 1940's to screen out people who are not committed to liberalism, but all in the name of neutrality. He was part of this screening process, and he was being funded by trusting conservative laymen who did not know -- and still do not know -- that this was going on.
He has spent his career promoting the welfare state in the name of Jesus and Calvin. I believe, as Mises believed, that they're all a bunch of socialists. They are committed to this ethical principle: "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote." These people dominate self-accredited, carefully screened academia. What Buckley wrote in God and Man at Yale in 1951, anyone could write regarding 99% of the colleges in the United States today, including the ones whose donors are Christians.
CONFRONTATION
I have always been known as being rhetorically confrontational. I selected this lifelong strategy in my years as an undergraduate in college. It is not necessary to be rhetorically confrontational in everything you write. You have to pick your battlefields. But when you go onto a battlefield, you had better be ready to fight.
In academia, it is not considered polite to be rhetorically confrontational, unless you are a Marxist. There aren't many Marxists anymore. Yet some of the most famous scholars have been devastatingly rhetorical. In historiography, A. J. P. Taylor was legendary for his scathing and contemptuous book reviews in academic journals. No historian ever wanted to be "Taylored." But Taylor wrote so many first-rate books, that he could get away with it. In his autobiography, he included a photograph of himself in front of an entire bookcase that was filled with books he had written. He cranked them out. (For an accurate indication of his influence, in 15 seconds, click here.)
When you're paid for your entire career to be soft core and not make waves -- ripples are acceptable -- and therefore not endanger donations that would otherwise flow in from your employer's soft-core supporters, you tend to be soft core. This man started out soft core, and he never deviated. He was paid from the beginning to blur distinctions. The Board of Trustees did not ask him to change his rhetoric; it paid him to preserve his rhetoric and extend it. He did.
In all things social and political, the man has been a soft-core Leftist. He doesn't like conservatism. He doesn't like libertarianism. He doesn't like my version of Calvinism. He doesn't like the Puritans. He doesn't like 19th-century Presbyterianism. What he likes is the faculty lounge.
He does not understand that we are in a war for the civilization. His article, almost 40 years later, argues that the stakes are high. But his idea of high stakes are the stakes of the faculty lounge. He has always denied the possibility of Christian social transformation. So, for him, high stakes center on fund-raising.
This is why he says that we should all be sweetie pies. But there is a problem with this. Sweetie pies get eaten by opponents who understand just how high the stakes are.
He writes that, in our first meeting at the airport, I walked away without shaking his hand. I don't remember it. It doesn't sound like me. But maybe I did. He adds this: one of the people who had invited us to debate mentioned that he looked forward to the dialogue between us. I don't like the word dialogue, either as a noun or a verb -- especially a verb. I prefer the word "confrontation." I like the word "debate." I prefer "no-holds-barred debate." So, I told the individual who made the statement that we had not come to be in a dialogue. We had come to battle for the hearts and minds of the audience. That sounds exactly like what I would say. But I don't recall the meeting. He suely does. It made an impression on him.
Hard-core people make an impression on soft-core people. Soft-core people rarely make any impression.
Soft-core liberals core grant immunity to hard-core Leftists, especially if they are people of color. Leftist hustlers have long recognized this. Their targets are soft-core liberals who are guilt-manipulated patsies. The classic article on this is Tom Wolfe's "Radical Chic," a legendary description of what the Black Panthers did at Leonard Bernstein's birthday party. It's here. Wolfe later used it as the lead article in his book, Radical Chic: Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers. "Radical Chic" retroactively defined the high-income Left of the late 1960's. It was just as bad on campus. The Black Liberation take-over of Cornell University, 1968-69, was an example of how far liberal academics could be pushed.
There is a dual standard operating here. It has operated for at least 80 years. Politeness must be shown by conservatives, but hard-core Leftists are given a free ride. Campus liberals and their institutional fund-raisers get in a huff when an occasional outsider on the Right doesn't play by the rules of the faculty lounge.
Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 wrote these words in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. They are more relevant today than they were then, for the Left has controlled academia for two additional generations.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the picture is the extent to which the bourgeoisie, besides educating its own enemies, allows itself in turn to be educated by them. It absorbs the slogans of current radicalism and seems quite willing to undergo a process of conversion to a creed hostile to its very existence. Haltingly and grudgingly it concedes in part the implications of that creed. This would be most astonishing and indeed very hard to explain were it not for the fact that the typical bourgeois is rapidly losing faith in his own creed.This is verified by the very characteristic manner in which particular capitalist interests and bourgeoisie as a whole behave when facing direct attack. They talk and plead--or hire people to do it for them; they snatch at every chance of compromise; they are ever ready to give in; they never put up a fight under the flag of their own ideals and interests--in this country there was no real resistance anywhere against the imposition of crushing financial burdens during the last decade or against labor legislation incompatible with the effective management of industry.
But he offered hope. "Means of defense were not entirely lacking and history is full of examples of the success of small groups who, believing in their cause, were resolved to stand by their guns." It infuriates the denizens of the faculty lounge when anyone sticks to his guns. It rarely happens on campus. This is why they deeply resent outsiders who see what is happening, who are in no way dependent on them, and who say so in public.
Let me remind you: the battle for the minds of the men who can change society is not organized from inside the faculty lounge.
HOW TO DEBATE
When you debate, debate to win. When you debate, target that portion of the audience which has not yet made up its mind. You debate to convince your followers (10%) that you are hard core. You debate to convince the other guy's followers (10%) that you are hard core, and he was upended by being soft core. Make them think this: "Why wasn't he tougher?" Debate to persuade more undecided people in the audience that your position is correct than those who decide that your opponent's position is correct. This is not the faculty lounge; this is verbal warfare.
I teach the English 3 course for the Ron Paul Curriculum. This week, I am producing ten lessons on verbal persuasion. I begin with debates. They will read these debates for two weeks. I begin with the British Parliament's debates over the taxation of the American colonies: 1875 (Stamp Act) and 1775 (closing Boston harbor). Also included: the Quebec Act of 1774. William Pitt argued against the Stamp Act and the Quebec Act. Edmund Burke argued against the closing of Boston Harbor and all taxation of the colonies' internally. They said such taxation was a mark of tyranny and in violation of traditional English liberties. They pulled no verbal punches. In two debates, Pitt won the first and lost the second. Burke overwhelmingly lost. But everything he had predicted then came true. The British spent a fortune, but the Americans won the war. If the British had listened to Pitt in 1774, we probably still would be part of the Commonwealth. It was too late by the time Burke gave his speech. Three weeks later, Paul Revere rode.
The time for becoming soft core is after you have had a complete victory and are in power. Then, on the basis of noblesse oblige, you can shake hands with the losers. That was what Pitt and Burke recommended to Parliament. Parliament was hard core when it should have been soft core. Parliament got its head handed to it at Yorktown. On the Army's way out of Yorktown, the band played "The World Turned Upside-Down."
Why do I spend two weeks in a literature course on verbal persuasion? Because ideas have consequences. Because events in history have turned on speeches that have forthrightly argued for a position.
William Jennings Bryan, a non-Calvinist, in 1896 converted the Democratic Party from a free market, gold standard party to a liberal, Populist, and then Progressive party with one speech that lasted 30 minutes. That speech changed American political history more than any other speech in history. He did not take prisoners. He went for the jugular, and he severed it. I never liked his Arminian theology, and I despised his politics. But he never gave an inch. He was courageous. He did not compromise. He was the greatest speaker of his generation. Most important of all: he was not inclined to "dialogue."
CONCLUSION
When you are trying to lay the foundations of a victory, and trying to recruit hard-core people who will not sell out or run for cover, and you are in the early stages of the conflict, remember this: "Soft core loses every time." Soft core is for the faculty lounge.
When you see that you are in a war, fight to win. When you are on a battlefield in which you are in a position to persuade an audience that this really is a war, not the faculty lounge, do not hold back. Go for the jugular.
Never give an inch.