American Thought Leaders - Why Trump May Be the First Post-Racial President: Bob Woodson and Joshua Mitchell

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

“I think race is a very emotional issue with black America, and it can be very easily manipulated. And it has been manipulated for decades by people who use it to direct blacks to vote in a certain way.”In this latest episode in our special series on the U.S. presidential transition, I sit down with Bob Woodson and Joshua Mitchell. Woodson is a civil rights activist and the Founder and President of the Woodson Center. Mitchell is a professor of political theory at Georgetown University.“The partisan debate on race is driven by guilty whites who are seeking absolution from crimes they never committed, and entitled blacks who are seeking absolution from injustices they never suffered,” says Woodson.What does Trump’s victory mean for black America? Will Trump be the first post-racial president? And what is the role of mediating institutions and what Woodson and Mitchell call “invisible knowledge” in revitalizing American communities?“We have levels of despair and depression because the state has become this administrative behemoth, making citizen competence impossible,” says Mitchell. “We’ve got this invitation, literally, to return to the founders’ vision, where we have citizen competence. The only way you can have small government is if you have massive citizen competence.”“The biggest challenge we’re facing is a moral and spiritual free-fall that is consuming people of all races and all colors,” says Woodson. “But we’re not going to be able to find the source of this solution if we are separated by race, and that’s why we must become post-racial.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Race is a very emotional issue with Black America, and it has been manipulated for decades by people who use it to direct Blacks to vote in a certain way. In this episode, I sit down with Bob Woodson and Joshua Mitchell. Bob Woodson is a civil rights leader, author, and founder and president of the Woodson Center. Joshua Mitchell is a professor of political theory at Georgetown University. The partisan debate on race is driven by guilty whites who are seeking

absolutions from crimes they never committed, and entitled blacks who are seeking absolution from injustices they never suffered. What does Trump's election victory mean for black America? Will Trump be the first post-racial president? And how can America revitalize its ailing communities? We have levels of despair and depression because the state has become this administrative behemoth, making citizen competence impossible. So we've got this invitation to return to the founders

vision where we have citizen competence. The only way you can have small government is if you have massive citizen competence. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Bob Woodson, Josh Mitchell, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Pleased to be here. Glad to be here. So Bob, as someone who is deep in the civil rights movement and being a self-proclaimed radical pragmatist, what happened with the black vote this time around? I think what you witness is liberation. I think race is a very emotional issue with black America, and it can be very easily manipulated and it has been manipulated for decades by people who use it to

direct blacks to vote in a certain way but i think over the time it's matured to the point where people are more concerned about their public personal safety and how much money they have in their pockets over what someone's race is and so i think you saw a maturity there they became radical pragmatist and refused to allow race to dominate their decisions fascinating so are we seeing a sort of post-racial movement here, Josh? Well, I would add to what Bob is saying. Black America has been, to put the matter baldly, the plaything of the state for a very, very long time. And I think since the 1960s, the expectation would be the Democratic Party would deliver. And since identity politics came to the fore, the idea the Democratic Party had, I think, was that there would be this vast alliance of people of color who would be known as the innocent victims and that this political coalition would come to predominate. But as Bob said, Americans, black and white, everyone, are preeminently practical people.

And I think a large number of so-called people of color woke up and realized it won't do simply to take the identity politics label, the innocent victimhood label, when in fact their bank accounts are faltering, when they don't have security. So I think we've reached a cultural moment where where identity politics is at least for the moment vanquished and we have a whole new opportunity here in one sense blacks have lived in a banana Republic for the last 50 years I mean all of the cities where there's major decline that has

occurred over the last 50 years have all been run by liberal democratic administrations, so if partisan politics alone Were the source of salvation? The question is why have we witnessing all of this decline over the past 50 years? I was born during the Depression in a low-income black neighborhood in South Philadelphia. There were no middle-class people there, but 96% of all households had a man and a woman raising children. Elderly people could walk safely

without fear of being assaulted by their grandchildren. Never heard of gunfire. Children were not shot in their cribs. It was unheard of. We have the highest marriage rate of any group in society, even though jujuri segregation was the rule. So one can look at the circumstance of low-income blacks and ask yourself, how were we able to achieve in the face of these circumstances when the great promise of the Civil Rights Movement

and political participation was, if you vote for us, these conditions will improve. And I think now the blacks are waking up to that reality and beginning to migrate towards becoming swing voters. I don't think they're moving to become Republicans. I think they're moving more towards becoming swing voters. Politicians are going to have to earn their vote. Yes. They have agreed to become competitive. And that's wholesome for the country, and it's in the best interest of the black community to be competitive.

So, Josh, what do you think the opportunity is here? Well, America is first and foremost a middle-class commercial republic, and we have to get back to building things. And so I don't know that it's going to be easy I think there are huge challenges to to moving away from globalism toward a middle-class commercial republic but what we have to do is to is to is to recognize that the people who are working with their hands and this is not only whites but blacks and Hispanics and all the rest, have to be given an opportunity. Our state craftsmen have to be thinking about how they can make sure that this group thrives

from here on in. Instead of thinking about global capital, we have to start thinking about the people who are living everyday lives among us. And just maybe explain to me, what does this mean exactly, this middle-class commercial republic? There's only one philosophical tradition in America that's ever developed, and it's called pragmatism. Why?

Because Americans, unlike Europeans who are involved in very high-level theoretical debates, which led to the disasters of socialism and national socialism, by the way. Americans have always been a practical people and the disease of the last 20 years at least has been that we've been asked to think ideologically. Are you pure? Are you stained? And what we have to do now is put away all that. We have to become a truly post-racial society. And of course, the word on the street was that Obama was the first post-racial president. It will probably be Trump who's the first post-racial president. So we have to be moving in that direction, I think. I think President Obama was in the position to be the first post-racial president. But as soon as he came out in that speech at Morehouse University,

where he prodded young men to step up and be fathers, and he was castigated by the civil rights leadership, he retreated from that, never spoke about personal responsibility again, and he eventually devolved with the Trayvon Martin situation by saying Trayvon Martin could have been my son. That was a death knell to racial, ending racial polarization in America. He became a racial president from that moment on. And it's ironic ironic that President-elect Trump attracted 30% of black independent men and the largest number of Hispanics because he spoke to the practical needs of people. And so that's why I think he is the first post-racial president. He's not a guilty white person, which to me is refreshing. Well, so what do you mean by not a guilty white person?

My young colleague Delano Squires, I think, framed it. He said a lot of this partisan debate on race is driven by guilty whites who are seeking absolutions from crimes they never committed and entitled blacks who are seeking absolute absolution from injustices they never suffered. The biggest challenge that we're facing is a class phenomena from both the left and the right. You have racial grievance merchants. The civil rights movement has dwarfed into a race grievance industry. 70% of all these 22 trillion that we've spent in the past 50 years on poverty programs, 70% of it goes to middle-class people, black, white, who are providing

services to the poor. So we've created a commodity out of poor people. And we wonder why we fail. So they ask which problems are fundable, not which ones are solvable. And going back to Josh's point, that any group's participation in American economy isn't what government does for them. It's their small business formation rates. In a healthy economy, only three percent of Americans are entrepreneurs,

but they generate 70 percent of the jobs. And entrepreneurs tend to be C students, not A students, according to David Birch's study at MIT. A students come back to universities and teach C students in Dow. Fascinating. Is that really true? Yes, sir. That's amazing.

I didn't know that. Yes. Whenever I say this to business groups, they laugh. I was quick in Miami, and they looked in the back room, he said, yeah, this guy was the last person in our law Law class and he can buy all of us Identity politics is built on on guilt and I think part of the reason why there has been such a

an unpredictable Reaction to Trump Russia collusion, all this stuff. He's literally, the way I put it in print, is the wrong kind of white man. Because if you're white, and I have no interest in defending blood and soil politics, so please don't misunderstand me. But if you're a white man, you have to be guilty. You have to defend every innocent victimhood cause. And if you don't, you're considered toxic.

And Joe Biden and Waltz, the Democrat model of a male, is this guilty white male. And Trump literally cannot exist in that world. This is why you have to invent a demonic source that brings him forth like Russia or something like this. And the victory of Trump is a cultural declaration that America is done looking at people as if they're guilty or innocent victims. It does nobody any good. We have a generation of men, black and white, who are told that they need to recede, and they are receding with drugs and violence and pornography and video games. We need to bring them back. It cannot be the case that the future

is female, and so I have two sons. It cannot be the case that all of us who have sons and grandsons have to tell them that they need to step aside. We need to build a regime based on competence, full stop, and give everybody an opportunity to develop along those lines. And what's so wondrous about Bob's groups is that they're not interested in talking about guilt and innocence. They are interested in demonstrating competence to themselves and to others around them, and they are looked up to by younger members of the community who are at risk.

And as one of Bob's people, Julia, had said in one of our meetings, the reason why people succeed is they have somebody they don't want to let down. And that person is a person of competence. And we have to stop thinking in terms of economic efficiency on the libertarian right. We have to stop thinking in terms of innocent victimhood on the left. And we have to focus singularly on developing the competence of our fellow citizens. You know, this is a perfect opportunity to just talk a little bit about, maybe let's start with your background, Bob. Of course, you've been on the show, we've talked about the work you've done at the Woodson Center,

but just give us a thumbnail of, you know, how you came into this from the beginning. Well, first of all, I was born in South Philadelphia, the youngest of five children, to a mother with a fifth grade education. My dad was a laborer, very strong. He got a job at a time when men did not, blacks did not drive trucks from the dairies, I mean from the train to the dairies. And he took the job and he had to fight his way to keep it. They said, you can have it if you can keep it. He's a very strong-willed guy guy but this is under Jim Crow basic yeah this is Jim in 1937 in the midst of the depression and also Jim Crow and he was with the has some war related wounds He fought in the First World War with New York Hellcats, Harlem Hellcats.

But he had some chronic problems. It resulted in him dying when I was about nine, leaving my mother with five children to raise in this neighborhood. But, again, it was secure. And so I had to rely upon my peers as an alternative family. And so I gained an appreciation why kids join gangs. But I was blessed to be equipped with the kind of values that I chose good friends. And they, there are three of us left today. When they were a year older than me, and they dropped, so they went into college. And I was unaffiliated,

and so I dropped out and went into the Air Force in 1954. I was in the space program, and the Air Force saw things in me, and I went to college while I was in the Air Force. University of Miami, 12 credits. Only I had to be taught on the base because I couldn't walk on campus. I had 12 credits from University of Miami at a time and I could not walk on the campus. So I knew what racism was all about. Long story short, after I got out, I worked my way through college, into a black college. Thank God there wasn't affirmative action that would have put me at pin. But I went to a small black college, Cheney,

where I got the kind of intellectual nurturing that I needed that prepared me for a full scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. Got involved in the civil rights movement, but became very disenchanted when I realized that people, that there was a bait and switch game going on where we used the demographics of poor blacks to promote remedies and when funding came it did not go to poor blacks it went to middle-class providers so I left the civil rights movement following the death of dr. King and began to work on

behalf of low-income people of all races. And so I have been singularly focused on serving the needs of the least of God's children, which means that I have to be clear and constant in that commitment. And so therefore, I thought it was necessary to be humble, but also, in the words of Dr. King, be open to self-criticism. So those are the principles that have guided my work. So I have worked now on behalf of low-income people since the late 60s.

I have worked on behalf of low-income people of all races. I've worked with Native Americans on takeover of Alcatraz. I worked with Cesar Chavez and helped him get farm workers, helped them to acquire a medical facility affordable to help farm workers. So my work has singularly been concentrating on the class issue, and that's what's missing today. And if I may add, through this unique approach of going into communities class issue. And that's what's missing today. And if I may add, through this unique approach of going into communities that are, you know, let's call it disadvantaged, I don't know what term you're supposed to use, and finding

people that are succeeding there and empowering them. For many years, the name of my organization had the word enterprise in it. It was only changed to the Woodson Center for the past six years because my name is more associated with the principles than the enterprise. But the reason I selected it is because the same principles that work in the market economy work in the social economy. And so what the Woodson Center does, we go into low-income communities with sort of like a venture capitalist without capital. We go into there and we look for social entrepreneurs, people who were in prison, people who had overcome tremendous odds in their lives.

They were alcoholics. They were prostitutes. Through God's grace, they became redeemed, and they used their redemptive qualities to influence others. And this is where Josh and I come together, because a lot of conservatives believe that the way you change people is to teach them. And so there's a great reliance on intellectual white papers, and if we just have the right policies, then people's practice will change.

Well, to me, I understood that values are not taught. They're caught. And so grassroots leaders are able to redeem and promote redemption and reform of individuals by actually modeling the kind of values that they want people to emulate. And as a consequence, I have been a party to the restoration of whole communities just based upon the enterprising work of three or four people. They're able to affect hundreds, and so the Woodson Center has been there to not only document it,

but also provide access to capital. So two things that a venture capitalist brings to an enterprise. They bring capital, but they also bring managerial expertise because entrepreneurs are poor bookkeepers and grassroots people are poor bookkeepers. And so what the Woodson Center does is provide training and also access to capital so they can take what works for 10 people and affect a thousand. But the qualities that make these grassroots healing agents effective makes them invisible. And that's because elitism prevents both conservatives and liberals looking to them, to untutored people, as a source of solution. That's why I say there is wisdom that is learned and wisdom that is earned.

Grassroots people earn their wisdom, and therefore we as a society can benefit from them, but they're ignored as a source of new insight, and that's why this administration is poised, is in a position to really harvest that knowledge and put these people to work healing this community, this society. If a mother who lost two sons in a toxic violent neighborhood who were able to forgive the people who committed these crimes and used turn that pain into purpose and caused 20 other moms to find healing perhaps they have something to teach a middle-class mother who lost a child to suicide. And so the biggest challenge we're facing is a moral and spiritual freefall that is

consuming people of all races and all colors. But we're not going to be able to find a source of this solution if we are separated by race, and that's why we must become post-racial. The question is, what kind of knowledge does a democracy need to thrive? And there's two choices. It's either this invisible knowledge, this practical, hands-on experience,

or it's intellectual policy knowledge. And the greatest mind, I think, of the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America, saw this very, very clearly. The Europeans, he said, are looking over the Atlantic and saying, these people have no philosophers, no great artists, no great literary figures. And Tocqueville said, yes, but they have this invisible reservoir of practical experience, and that's why they can build a democracy and Europe cannot. So Bob and I met at a think tank, which will go unnamed. And we were listening to the presentation. And he caught my eye.

I caught his eye. And I should say, I had just come back. I'd been in the Middle East for, I'm still with Georgetown, but took many years off and went to the Middle East to help build programs. And then I left Georgetown for two years and went to Iraq to help build the American University of Iraq in Kurdistan. And it was a winner-take-all political arrangement.

And I said to the students, we're not going to do winner-take-all. There's an orphanage down the road. They need help in learning English, and I'm going to force you to go down, and we're going to do this thing called civic associations, mediating institutions. And they looked at me and they said, what's that? And I realized then, even though I had been a Tocqueville scholar for many, many years, I realized then that the key to building a democracy is you must have this nonpolitical

space where people can demonstrate their competence and become leaders in their community. And so when I came back and Bob and I were looking at each other across the table, I heard Bob talk and I said, this is the living embodiment of what Tocqueville has been saying. And it's unfortunate because in the 1990s, before 9-11, there was a growing, and Bob was part of this, a growing convergence left and right. After the Berlin Wall fell, people on the left and even people on the right began to see that the key to revitalizing America would be revitalizing the mediating institutions, the families, the churches, the local groups, et cetera. And then 9-11 hit. And everything was about consolidation of power

at the level of the state. And we developed what could be called the national security state. What we're realizing now is that the cost of this, for 20 years plus, is that people have become lonely, isolated. We've got depression rates that are through the roof. We've got citizens who think they only

can look to the state to take care of them, and yet Bob's groups show us that that, in fact, is not the case. And so we need to completely revitalize America. And the key is not going to be another policy white paper. The key is going to be recognizing that what we need is already there. We just need to look for it and find it and support it. This is the way we go forward. It's the corollary to rebuilding the middle class. We have to do what the Doge people

are saying, which is we have to cut back federal government spending. But the only way we can do that is if we have a compensating increase in the social capital that Bob keeps talking about. And so we have to find these local groups, these local people everywhere in our community. This is not a national problem. This is a local problem. We need to find these people. We need to support them. The government can be a supplement to that effort, but can't be a substitute for that effort. So we're at this remarkable moment when we're talking about reducing federal spending, when we have levels of despair and depression because the state has become this administrative behemoth,

making citizen competence impossible. So we've got this invitation, literally, to return to the founder's vision where we have citizen competence. The only way you can have small government is if you have massive citizen competence, and that's developing this invisible knowledge, which Bob's groups have been doing for four years

there are two ways that you can prevent someone from competing the first is by law that's what segregation was all about but the second one is more insidious is tell them you don't have to compete we'll take care of you we'll take care of you black America listen you don't have to compete. We'll take care of you. We'll take care of you. Black America, listen, you don't have to compete. After all, the legacy of slavery, if you're having babies out of wedlock, destroying each

other through violence, it's not your fault. It's the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. And therefore, whites are responsible for your condition. And until and unless they change, there's little you can expect to do. That's the narrative coming to today. When this was expressed in 1619 with Nicole Hannah-Jones,

it brought together like-minded black journalists to condemn America, to say America should be defined by its birth defect of slavery. What the Woodson Center's reaction was, since the messages were black, is to identify black messages to provide an alternative narrative, not an alternative debate. And so what we said that unless there is fact-based truths, then lies become normal. And so what we went back into the history of black America,

and so our first book, Red, White, and Black, rescuing America from race hustlers and revisionists, and now Pathways to American Renewal, these two books stand as evidence because we went back and document when whites were at their worst, blacks were at their best. There were five major high schools at the turn of the century in New York, Baltimore, Washington, Atlanta, and New Orleans that had crumbling buildings, used textbooks, half the budget of white schools, every one of those black high schools out-tested every white school in those cities.

If we were able to perform, that the best antidote to disrespect is performance. We understood that then, and so the question is if we were able to accomplish these things in the midst of the jury segregation, why are our kids failing in systems run by their own people today? So obviously the issue is not race, and we say that it is a restoration of values. There were 25 elderly care institutions in Philadelphia up until 1960s. So when black elderly, there were beautiful stone buildings right next to churches

where parents and kids could come and serve the elderly and they would be cared for. But when the government came along with the Comprehensive Mental Health and Mental Retardation Act, regulated 25 of these institutions in Philadelphia out of business because they said you got to have an elevator in a facility over two stories even though the elderly on the first floor you got to have a full-time nurse there was a tyranny of credentials certification became the power arbiter not moral authority but credentialed authority and as a result these institutions within two years were obliterated. And what happened to the elderly? They went into these expensive high-rise facilities that are being managed by these

corporations or they went into hospitals away from their communities and a death rate soared. That's just one example of how government came in and obliterated and wiped out mediating institutions. Urban renewal wiped out whole business sections. We document all of this in our two books so that it was government policies that decimated it. It wasn't racism. It wasn't a history of slavery or discrimination.

And a lot of middle class black civil rights leaders and all that profited from this takeover of these institutions. And so it's more of a class issue that we have in society today than it is a race issue. I noticed in an article that you wrote in The Hill about indigenous mediating institutions. That's interesting. I'm going to get you to tell me in a moment what the distinction is, but do nonprofits count as these mediating institutions? Looking at, for example, know homelessness and drug addiction crisis and say San Francisco or some LA and these other cities one of the criticisms that's been laid has been something along the lines of what you just said

that you have you know incredibly well-funded nonprofits that are basically incentivized to maintain the fact that there's homelessness because they they're they're incentivized to have as many homeless out there so they can help them so to speak or at least this is the allegation that's been made so if you're saying we should be supporting the mediating institutions probably there's a lot of people out there right now thinking hey wait a sec there's a lot of these mediating institutions out there now that aren't doing such a good job, right? How is this different? There are, the issue isn't government or just all government is bad or all private is good.

Mediating institutions are different than just not-for-profits. In other words, there was a study done by Don and Rachel Warren when they asked low-income people where do they turn to in times of trouble and they they identify institutions within their own community so so real legitimate mediating institutions are distinct because they produce outcomes that the people accept mmm could the connoisseur to you talking about, they're driven by the funders. Most mediating institutions are not funded by the government. And so if you go into a community, you have to look at what is the source of the funding

and what do they do. So just because they say they are an intermediary doesn't mean that they are. And so what we do in our publications and lay out our clear standards is how do you distinguish between a legitimate grassroots group and then one that is imposing people. First of all, the legitimate grassroots groups

understand that you cannot generalize about the poor. Some people are just broke. But their character's intact, and they use temporary assistance as an ambulance service, not a transportation system. They come in, they get help, they're free. Then you got category two, who are people who are disincentives. If they get a job, they're gonna lose daycare. who are people who are disincentives.

If they get a job, they're going to lose daycare. So if you take the perverse incentives away, they will prosper. But the third group that our groups are concentrated on are people who are poor because of the chances that they take and the choices that they make. Legitimate grassroots people understand that redemption and transformation has to precede help. If so, a legitimate homeless program in Denver, for instance, that we support as Step 13, requires people to be sober, to maintain certain standards of behavior as a condition of health. And as a consequence,

step 13 has taken hundreds of people and moved them in a direction of sobriety. By contrast, when a not-for-profit is running a homeless shelter that just gives people a place to live, they're able to get their drunk only and continue to drink and keep their behavior. So legitimate grassroots leaders and organizations have high moral standards that are required as a condition of help and they are able to generate that, inspire that, because many of the people running the programs were former addicts or former.

In other words, if the prodigal son, if the father had gone into the bar and given him the cloak, the ring, and the sandals when he was drinking, it would have validated his aberrant behavior. But it was only when the prodigal son, the Bible said, he came to himself, and he became humble and contrite and went to his father and said, I don't even deserve to be your father, to your son. And so grassroots organizations inspire that kind of redemption and transformation, and as a consequence, they're able to recover whole communities of people. It's important for that distinction to be made.

So we use the term mediating institutions, and we need to think about why it is we use it. And again, the great theorist Alexis Tocqueville said, the future is going to be this unless we watch out. And the future will be one powerful state and a bunch of lonely, isolated individuals who are dependent upon the state. And so he says there has to be something that lies between the state and these lonely individuals that gathers them together through moral authority, for starters. And your question prompts us to think, you know, what is it, what really are we looking for in these media and institutions? Why aren't, say, philanthropic organizations, why don't they often fit the bill? And Bob said it. The family's fixed, the churches are fixed, but then there's this vast domain where individuals or small groups

of people are responding constantly to new situations, new persons that are coming along. They've got the fluidity to be able to move. They've got the deep knowledge to be able to respond. On the other hand, a lot of these philanthropic organizations have a policy that they want to impose on a world, and that's very, very different. If I may, let me just back up one second to the 1619 Project, because Bob understated it. When the 1619 Project came out, there were a number of people, conservatives, who said, America's not stained, it's pure. And the virtue of the 1776 project, which I had some small part in, was that we said, yeah, that slavery thing, that was a bad thing. But here's the difference.

Our criteria for moving forward is not that something is pure. Our criteria is, can it be redeemed? And our view was that America, for all of her problems, is still on the path toward hope and redemption. Suffering is not an argument against life. That's the key here. And so the 1776 project differed from the 1619 project, who said, there's systemic racism, there's nothing you can do because that's the moral lesson of systemic racism. You either can do nothing or you have to depend upon the state. We rejected that and we rejected those on the right who said, no, America is this pure project. It's not. Every nation is an

impure project just as every family is an impure project. That doesn't mean we don't go on. And the groups that Bob's worked with, all of them, as Bob has said, have been through their personal hell, and that's not an argument against life. And that's the kind of people we need support, and they're everywhere if we just look. Let me just say that the solution is not to fund more think tanks to produce white papers. That's important, but it's incomplete. I was blessed to spend five years at the American Enterprise Institute and did most of my writing from there, and so I really cherish that opportunity. What I'm saying more to my colleagues, leave your institutions and go and interact

with some of the people you write about. Use your time to study their success and write about your success. Let it be reflected in your literature. So that's where we have a confluence of interest between learned knowledge and media knowledge, that we need both. If a political party can raise and spend $1 billion in three months and come up with a deficit, certainly there's enough private dollars around that we can invest in these mediating institutions so that it will enable them to demonstrate to the society that this moral and spiritual free fall that is consuming whites, blacks, rich, poor, because of this moral decline that the answers to this is abide in some of these mediating

institutions and low-income communities. And so that's why we're encouraging at the Woodson Center that we make major investments. We have what we call a Joseph Fund. We're trying to raise $50 million, where 100% of that money will go out the door and invest in these institutions in the community so that they can begin to flourish and close the gap between what they can afford to do and what they're capable of doing. There's racial grievance people not only on the left, but on the right too. There are some people on the right who don't want this racial antagonism to go away because they're profiting from it. And so we think that the true challenge is class and it's not race. is how do we encourage private investment in these media institutions so that they can yield the outcomes that will help the society restore the civic virtues. All of these groups that we

support, 3,000 of them in 39 states, all operate on the values of our founders, the virtues and values of the founders of this nation. And the way you persuade people to embrace these values is to see virtue in action. People want to see a sermon, they're tired of hearing a sermon. And our grassroots leaders are actually living sermons. If you're for a smaller government, which I am, then you must be for aggressive support of media and institutions. 25 years ago, we had a situation in Washington where there were 53 murders in a five square block area in

a bending terrace public housing. We helped five ex-offenders who were intermediaries go in and negotiate a truce and that murder rate went down to one in 12 years. Well think about the cost benefit of that intervention. Every time a person is shot or injured and they're taken to an intensive care unit, it's $5,000 a day. Right. Well, and also the social upheaval that- Upheaval, the loss of wages.

So that, can you imagine if we were able to produce that kind of outcome why don't we invest in more of these intermediate interventions coming from mediating structures that have the consequence of changing to be improving the behavior of people and as a consequence uh the the is down we took some of the principles that we learned and took it to Milwaukee and applied it to seven schools. As a result of that seven school intervention, they found out that crime was down in areas around the school 60%. So there is interventions that are occurring that can help.

So it's practical. With the passing of Jimmy Carter, we are reminded of his phrase, there's a malaise that has struck the country. And there is a malaise. And government spending on social programs is now like pushing on a string. We've reached the point where it can no longer work. Alexis de Tocqueville, who I must cite again, said, democracy unleashes an energy never before seen

in human civilization. And he says, I praise it not for what it does, but for what it causes to be done. He understands that if you give the local people the resources to build their own world, yeah, it'll be messy. But it unleashes an energy never before seen in human civilization. What it causes to be done is it draws people out of themselves.

It helps them build a world together. And we have a crisis, especially among the young. They are enwrapped by the digital media. The only understanding of justice they have is performative justice. Black Lives Matter. We stand with Ukraine. But are they going to do anything? No, we have to revitalize America. And the only way that we can do this is by decentralizing power,

giving people the opportunities to make a mess of things because they will. But but if you do that, you draw people out of themselves and they cease to be lonely and isolated, and they unleash this energy that America once had and that we can have again. We give an example, for instance, in our books about the Cajun Navy in Louisiana. When Hurricane Katrina hit, some fishermen, Cajun fishermen, got together and just started plucking people off the roofs of buildings. And now it has spread to thousands so that whenever there's a disaster someplace, the first responders are volunteers there before FEMA arrives. And that's the American spirit of civic renewal that we're trying to excite.

And we have examples in our literature all over the country where violence is. There are 600 kids from one public housing project in 14 years went on to college, eliminating teen pregnancy. Drug dealers were driven out. There have been islands of moral and spiritual excellence that have occurred as a consequence of supporting of these mediating institutions. But it's episodic. We don't have scholars from either side coming into these communities and studying the success. And so that's what we really need our scholars to come in and partner with our grassroots people and validate the triumph over despair. That's where Josh and I are coming there. We want to serve as a model for where these two worlds can come together to serve the interests of our community.

But again, in order to do it, what I love about Josh is as smart as he is, that's my A student. I'm a C student. But Josh is humble enough to know what he doesn't know. But he's also humble enough to go in and ask and be inspired by what he sees, even though it's being done by untutored people. Josh, it sounded like you're advocating for this, I guess, principle of subsidiarity, you know, have the smallest possible unit of governance or organization whenever possible function. Is that right?

Yeah. So one of the things that I think haunts all of us when we think about the relationship between mediating institutions and the state is, what is the proper way to think about this? And I think what's happened is that since the progressive era, 1880s really is when it begins, at least the thinking, since the progressive era, we've increasingly seen the state as a substitute for mediating institutions. And I think what we have to do is not simply state, well, we're against government, because I think a lot of conservatives want to say zero government, the libertarian view.

When you press it, if it's necessary, we'll have it, but we really don't want it. I think what we have to do is think about this differently. We have to say the government, the state government, national government, is a supplement to the mediating institutions, not a substitute for it. The EU has made a terrible mistake because they're trying to have the EU be a substitute for the nations as opposed to a supplement to the nations. We have to think in terms of this language of supplement and substitute to be able to get right the relationship between mediating institutions and government. Bob pointed out to me a number of years ago that if you were really against government intervention, what would you have done with the integration of University of Alabama and the National Guard troops?

I mean, that was probably a necessary intervention. So you want the state to step in, but you don't want it to overstep. But if it's going to be a supplement to, then we have to have these these institutions, mediated institutions, be revitalized in a very serious way. That's the challenge. The challenge is how to make government on top and not on top. That's good. You know and that's that's very different. When we had our gang intervention in Benning Terrace, these young men, just 16 of them, created all of this pandemonium. It was David Gilmour, the housing receiver, who hired them as maintenance personnel for six months. And they removed more graffiti

in three months than their maintenance crews did in three years because the young men had a sense of ownership of where they lived. They began to plant the flowers and engage in them. And what happened, David says, that they were going to tear that development down at a cost of $3 million. But because of the peace treaty that was solved that building now that's going to be restored so he says it makes sense I was going to tear it down for three million and have to relocate everybody there now I don't have to do that so I'm going to take a million of those dollars I saved and

invested in these young people and now some of them are restaurant owners and some of them are living successful lives. There is an example of government reinvesting in mediating institutions, not to do this as a permanent program, but to come in at a situation and create, so these young men are off on their own, their independence, but government stimulated that because of the changes of the behavior of the people. We don't see the connection between

human capital improvement and economic consequence of that improvement. And that's the case that scholars can make. Social capital precedes economic capital. And so if we can fight to restore social capital, the economic well-being, back to our point about the middle class, that will follow. But you can't just pour money in. You've got to restore social capital, and that requires patience. And I think one of you said it's messy.

Of course. And I've taught for a number of years at university, and I've asked my students, if your trade-off, if to have freedom, you have to have messiness, even ugliness, even prejudice. If to have freedom, you have to have all those things, will you take it? And most of my students these days say, I don't want the messiness. I'll take order. This is a huge, huge problem. We have to be able to live with the ugliness of life

and say that's not the final word. That's why I said suffering is not an argument against life. And the grassroots leaders have faced the ugliness of life, and they've said, no, this is not the final word. They are an inspiration. And not just to the people around them. We have, as Bob has said, we have a crisis of suicide in Palo Alto and the richest communities in the world, in the country and around the world, we're at a moment of despair in the American polity. And what we have to do is give citizens of all ages the belief that notwithstanding suffering, there is hope.

And that is, I think, the cultural moment we're in right now. And the only way I think to make good on it is if we can invest in the mediating institutions, because it's only in those face-to-face relations where life genuinely feels to be substantial and good, not episodic, but genuinely in an unsustained way. If I may, I'm just reminded of something Vivek Ramaswamy has advocated on this show, which is basically making civic engagement, I don't know, like a necessary part of life. When you're talking about empowering or even,

you know, promoting the idea of empowering these mediating institutions to function, it still feels a little bit abstract. Like, okay, what can I do here? Or, I mean, I guess I'm part of a mediating institution here, right, in a sense. But do you see what I'm saying? Yeah. So I have a cautious endorsement. I'm always a little nervous about national programs. However, I think if they can kickstart the spirit of

mediating institutions, that's great. So I will tell you, I don't care what university you teach in, students are not ready at 18 to go to college. There should be a national year or two of service where people are thrown together from all different backgrounds, as they were in the military, thrown together to do something locally. Maybe you get some college tuition benefit. I don't know. I'm not a policy person on this matter. But you've got to pull people out of themselves,

get them engaged with other people, so that they develop the habit of forming associations. And then they'll go back to their local communities. When these young men were redirected from gang violence, the first thing we said to them there is a price you must pay for the aid that you received okay this isn't charity you need to pay back for what was been given to you what are you passionate about they said we like we were passionate about being coaches good they became coaches they've been coaching for over 20 years so we we introduced

the requirement that you must give back for what you've received reciprocity and so these young men ended up the way the reason we were able to sustain the peace out there is because they became surrogate fathers and big brothers to the younger kids. And you could just have four of them in a room and 150 of them were sitting quietly taking directions. We set up three football teams. And then the same community that used to be a killing fields was packed with parents and kids being coached by these ex-gang members. There's an example that is baked into the whole process. I mean, no one has to give instructions, but it animated naturally out of these relationships. And when I

was at a business meeting, I said to the guys, are they ready for universities? No, let's let them earn it more. So after a month, they called me and I was at a business meeting in Vienna, Virginia, and I stopped to meet. I needed $15,000 to buy my boys uniforms. And so when we collected the money, when the suits were given, they were not given by the sponsors. They were given by the coaches. So it's a way of helping so that you're supporting existing relationships

and not some do-good or coming from outside offering. So how aid is given is as important as to what is given. And every step is intended to reinforce the relationship between the coaches and the kids. They got to the point where the parents and the teachers said that, no, the young men said that the kids are disciplined when they're with us and not with their teachers and with their parents. So they required the kids to have a behavioral card signed by both their teachers and their parents in order for them to practice. There is an example of social control coming in a natural, spontaneous way, and you multiply

that a thousand times. There are just so many unique ways that this is being done. Something that just strikes me about everything that you're talking about here is just it's really a lot about developing self-discipline. And also we were talking about this question of suffering, right? And suffering actually is going to be a part of life. Why not leverage that instead of fear it, I guess. That's kind of what I'm hearing. Yeah.

So I was recently at a gathering, and I was asked to say the prayer. And I said, dear God, we know from before all time you've gathered us together. We thank you for our joys and for our sufferings. And after the meal, someone pulled me aside and said, what do you mean for our sufferings? I said,ys and for our sufferings. And after the meal, someone pulled me aside and said, What do you mean, for our sufferings? I said, No, for our sufferings, for they teach us to. And I think we have to recognize that the sufferings, as horrendous as they can be, are invitations for us to do things that we can't even imagine,

to be called beyond ourselves and our comfort zone. I wish life weren't that way, but the whole of human history is this way. Well, and some of the greatest philosophers, at least in my view, and spiritual teachers. One of my favorites is Kahlil Gibran, A Tear and a Smile. I would not exchange the sorrows of my heart for the joys of the multitude, nor would I have the tears, the sadness flow from my every part, turning to laughter. I'd rather my life remain a tear and a smile. A smile to show my joy in existence and a tear to show my longing that I have. How did de Tocqueville know? I mean, maybe just give us a little bit

of a quick history lesson. You know, the time when de Tocqueville was writing, you know, Democracy in America, what he saw, what he saw was kind of where we are today already. And it was, it's, how did he see that? So he was a young man in his 20s late 20s his father was nearly put to death during the French Revolution and he wrote this magisterial book called Democracy in America which gets published 1835 in the second volume in 1840 and what I tell my students is two things It's written under the shadow of the French Revolution, meaning you have these

French who wanted to abolish the church, abolish the families, because it was time to have a whole new order. And what he saw was that this will produce a powerful state, a powerful administrative state, with lonely, isolated people. And the second thing I say to my students is, you have to understand this book to be the deepest rumination on the problem of loneliness in the democratic age. He writes in a letter, the saying, it is not good for man to be alone, applies to me especially. So the whole book is written with an apprehension of the tremendous loneliness and isolation that would happen in the next several hundred years. And he thought the Americans were singularly prepared to combat that because they had the habit of forming mediating institutions. The state comes second, the mediating institutions came first. Americans had to deal

with building a world together without the state for a 100 years or so. And so this habit of forming associations gets passed on generation to generation to generation. And what Bob and I are saying is it's still there. We don't have to invent anything. It's really there. We just have to look around in our local communities, find the people who are silently, quietly doing miraculous work to pull together people who are in need and to hold together the community and support them. It's all right there. We're just, we don't have the vision to see it. It's very interesting that one of our essays with Dr. John Sibley Butler, University of

Texas at Austin, in Pathways, in that book, he talks about at the turn of the century a Jewish scholar from Europe came to study blacks, how they handled oppression. So he was like the de Tocqueville coming to study how blacks achieved great, great things under segregation. In a way I think what you're saying is that we should actually take our inspiration for what blacks did under Jim Crow. Absolutely. We cut poverty in half in 1946 to 1964. There was no government intervention then.

We cut programs. As I told you, I was born in 1937. We don't have elderly people mugged in the streets back then, and we do now. We don't have children shot in cribs, and we do now. And we talk about in our writings what happened in Europe after the fall of communism. This parallel polis established where for five years civic institutions flourished. They provided daycare, picked up trash, performing arts, and they won the loyalties of the people in these countries, in Eastern Bloc countries, won the loyalty from them and

therefore when they then turned that to politics, they won elections. But they first developed loyalty so people look more to civic institutions than they did to government. And when you ask grassroots people, why do they turn to institutions that are in their own communities, because these institutions have delivered for them in times of need. Let me add here, it's curious, there's the question both on the left and the right, how should black America be thought about? And I think it's safe to say that on the left, black America has its moral authority, its suffering has been used as leverage for women's rights, for gay rights, for the transgender rights, that it's on the suffering

of black America that the moral authority of these groups has emerged. So civil rights goes to women's rights, goes to gay rights, et cetera. And we can talk about those issues, but I think it is a mistake to say that these issues derive their moral authority from black America. So black America on the left is seen as the fulcrum point on the basis of which you build a bridge farther out with one group after another. On the right, on the other hand, there's a deep reluctance to talk about multiple races, multiple groups. This is all one America. There's the rule of law. We don't have to talk about that. But I think what Bob and I are saying here

is that, no, there's a tremendous story. It's a story about American strength. And therefore, the way to think about Black America is it is Tocquevillian America. This is what Black America had to do was respond to a state that was against it. And it responded in the very way Tocqueville says is the genius of America, which is the mediating institutions. So so both the left and the right miss this.

You've got an opportunity here for the whole country to come together and say, we don't have to invent something. Black America is doing it. Other parts of America are doing it too, maybe not quite as well, maybe some places better, but we need to look to black America, not as the leverage point for innocent victimhood, that's what the left has done to its detriment, and not as something we don't even need to talk about, because what black America shows us at its best

is this Tocquevillian vision which we must return to in order to revitalize our country and you saw this act that on in the election when the democrats brought all these celebrities uh black celebrities and barack obama and all these others so all they have to do is bring these celebrities to the presence of black Americans and say, well they stand for this. But there was a rejection of this. And instead what low-income black America did was vote their interest. And to me that's a level of maturity and that needs to be exploited. Again, a lot of the people who purport to be progressives do so saying they are legitimate representatives of the so-called marginalized.

Well, if the so-called marginalized have an opportunity to speak for themselves and they say they don't represent me, it undermines their moral authority and America can get back to the business of rebuilding its civic and moral and spiritual infrastructure. So what should DOGE in your mind be doing or what should other institutions be doing on day one to facilitate this vision? Well minimally I think we have to ask the question or it people involved with it have to ask the question what can be devolved back to the state Department of Education for example. The federal government has no business in my view

being involved in education. So decentralize, decentralize, decentralize where possible but with a full understanding that you don't just cut spending and then everything takes care of itself. What it means is citizens are going to have to step up again. And so what we have now is infantilized citizenry that's concerned with Instagram and X and the rest. We're spending way too much time on that rather than engagement at the local level.

I tell my students, I would like every parent in America to go to sleep at night and wonder whether the educational system in the next school district or the next county is better than the one that they have. And if they're worried about it, they need to spend their energies figuring out how to make their own school system much better, as opposed to infantilized citizens who just say, oh, the Department of Education will take care of it.

Yes, emphasize cutting spending, but they have to doubly emphasize the fact that the burden will then come back to citizens to develop competencies to deal with these issues. I'd like to bring 2,000 of my grassroots leaders together from all over the country, different racial ethnic groups, and bring them before the Doge people to say, listen to these people. Learn from them. Ask them how to reduce crime. How do you encourage kids to learn? Because there are models out there that every problem that you can think of have been successfully addressed at the local level. But again, the qualities that makes them effective makes them invisible. And those needs and our scholars need to come in leave their their ivy towers

and come into the communities that we have cultivated and learn from them to inform policies that's the challenge well bob woodson josh mitchell such a pleasure to have had you on thank you thank you all for joining bob woodson josh mitchell and me on this episode of american the challenge. Well, Bob Woodson, Josh Mitchell, such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Bob Woodson, Josh Mitchell, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.