The Daily Signal - #365: What Liberty Really Is

Episode Date: December 19, 2018

Have we forgotten what liberty really is? Os Guinness is author of the book, "Last Call for Liberty", in which he argues that America’s genius for liberty could also become our Achilles heel.  Plus: It’s Dec. 20, which means time is running out to watch your favorite Christmas movies. But don't worry: we have recommendations on what to watch. We also cover these stories:--“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency,” President Trump tweeted, as reports indicated the United States was leaving the region.--Paul Ryan, the outgoing speaker of the house, delivered his farewell address on Wednesday, capping off a 20-year career in the House of Representatives.--Chick-fil-A is set to become the third most popular fast food chain in the country.The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, December 20th. I'm Kate Trankow. And I'm Daniel Davis. Well, if America is known for anything at all, it's known for loving liberty. But have we forgotten what liberty really is? Oz Guinness is author of the book Last Call for Liberty, in which he argues that America's Genius for Liberty could also become our Achilles' heel. To explain what he means by that, he'll join us in studio.

Plus, it's December 20th, which means time is running out to watch your favorite Christmas movies. We'll have a little debate about which ones are worth your time. Well, with a government shutdown looming just a few days away, Congress is moving to pass a stopgap spending bill to fund the government until February. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell introduced the bill after Democrats rejected a bill that included $1.6 billion for the border wall and a billion dollars in other immigration-related spending. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called that a slush fund for Trump to carry out his, quote, radical immigration agenda.

President Trump has recently backed off his demand for $5 billion in wall funding. We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency. President Trump tweeted on Wednesday, as reports indicated the United States was leaving the region. The Wall Street Journal reports that the 2,000 American troops there could be withdrawn in as little as 30 days, citing an unnamed official. Heritage Foundation analysts warned that ISIS isn't defeated in the region. region and a quick departure could have severe consequences. Well, President Trump notched a major win Tuesday with the Senate's passage of a sweeping criminal justice bill. The Senate passed the bill known as the First Step Act by a wide margin of

87 to 12. The bill was years in the making and was backed by an unusually diverse coalition of liberals, conservatives, and law enforcement groups. The bill gives judges more discretion in sentencing certain drug offenders and boosts efforts to rehabilitate for prisoners so as to reduce rates of recidivism. It also reduces the life sentence for drug offenders with three convictions down to 25 years. After the bill's passage, President Trump tweeted, quote, America is the greatest country in the world and my job is to fight for all citizens, even those who have made mistakes. This will keep our community safer and provide hope and a second chance to those who earn it. In addition to everything else, billions of dollars will be saved.

I look forward to signing this into law, end quote. While the House is expected to pass the bill this week, sending it to Trump's desk. A major new report is out from the Trump administration. The Daily Signals, White House correspondent Fred Lucas, reports that the Trump administration is calling for scrapping Obama administration regulations on school discipline. Heritage Foundation's Jonathan Butcher and an op-ed for the Daily Signal noted that when schools follow current Obama-era guidance, difficult and even dangerous students, can remain in class at the expense of other students. Educators and districts following the federal letters such as Oklahoma City and Hillsborough, Florida, report school safety has deteriorated.

And a study of Philadelphia schools found that the student achievements suffered among the peers of offending students when schools limited exclusionary discipline. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told the daily signal that when it came to the issue of safety, the media also needed to change its tune. She said, quote, more than one time we have heard complaints from parents of the victims about the attention given to those who carry out these awful incidents, referring to school shootings. It gives an incentive to pursue these horrid awful acts because of the notoriety they gain. We're just asking the media not to use their names and photographs. Well, Paul Ryan, the outgoing speaker of the House, delivered his farewell address on Wednesday,

capping off a 20-year career in the House of Representatives. In that speech, he recounted some of the GOP's proudest achievements from the past two years. Now, we have taken on some of the biggest challenges of our time, and we have made a great and lasting difference in the trajectory of this country. We began a historic rebuilding of our military and our national defense. We enacted new tough sanctions on some of our biggest foes. We ushered in a new career and technical education system, something so many of us have been talking about for so long.

Record regulatory reform to help small businesses. A long sought expansion of domestic energy production to be followed by America's new energy dominance. To stand the tide of opioid addiction, the most significant effort against a single drug crisis in congressional history. Criminal justice reform to give more people a chance of redemption, making its way through,

we're doing this all the way up to the, end. A landmark crackdown on human trafficking that is already yielding results in saving lies. A VA with real accountability and finally better care for our veterans. And after years of doubt, years of the cynics saying that it could not be done, we achieved the first major overhaul of our tax code in 31 years. But it wasn't all positive for Ryan. He expressed deep concern over the tenor of American politics and our divisive discourse. But today, too often, genuine disagreement quickly gives way to intense distrust. We spend far more time trying to convict one another than we do trying to develop our own convictions. Being against someone has more currency than being

for anything. And each of us, each of us has found ourselves operating on the wrong side of this equation from time to time. And all of this gets amplified by technology with an incentive structure that preys on people's fears and algorithms that play on anger, outrage has become a brand. And as with anything that gets marketed, it gets scaled up. It becomes more industrialized, more cold, more unfeeling. And that's the thing. For all the noise, there is actually less passion, less energy. We sort of default to lazy litmus test and shop-worn denunciations. It's just emotional pablum fed through a trough of outrage.

It's exhausting. It saps meaning from our politics. And it discourages good people from pursuing public service. I mean, the symptoms of it are in our face all the time. And we have to recognize that its roots run deep, deep into our culture, deep into our society today. and all of this pulls on the threads of our common humanity in what could be our unraveling, but nothing. Nothing says it has to be this way.

We all struggle. We are all fighting some battle in our lives. So why do we insist on fighting one another so bitterly? The New York Times reports that you may be surprised by what companies had access to certain information you put on Facebook. The Times writes, quote, Facebook allowed Microsoft's Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users' friends without consent,

the record show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users' private messages. Steve Satterfield, Facebook's director of privacy and public policy, told the Times that any business partners of Facebook's did have to abide by certain parameters, saying, quote, Facebook's partners don't get to ignore people's privacy settings. Well, Americans are eating more chicken, and you can tell because Chick-fil-A is set to become the third most popular fast food chain in the country.

That's according to a new report by Kalinowski Equity Research. Chick-fil-A's sales grew by 14% last year with well over 2,000 restaurants and more stores opening in the Midwest and Northeast. And I can certainly attest to that as well. one who has experienced the opening of two Chick-fil-Ais in my vicinity. So my life has been greatly enriched. Hashtag bless. Up next, Os Ginnis joins the podcast to discuss his new book, Last Call for Liberty.

Do you have an opinion that you'd like to share? I'm Rob Bluey, editor-in-chief of The Daily Signal, and I'm inviting you to share your thoughts with us. Leave us a voicemail at 202-608-6205 or email us at letters atdailysignal.com. Your's could be featured on the Daily Signal podcast. Well, joining us now on the podcast is Oz Guinness, the author of many books about politics, culture, theology, and so on. His latest book is called Last Call for Liberty, How America's Genius for Freedom has become its greatest threat. Oz, thanks so much for coming in. My pleasure.

Thank you. Oz, I wanted to ask first, starting with the title of your book, Last Call for Liberty, How America's Genius for Freedom has become its greatest. greatest threat. Can you unpack for us the core idea there? How has freedom, which most Americans view is our strength? How has that become a threat to our society? Well, there's no question that America is deeply divided. But what is it? People say it's another episode of left against right or maybe coastals against hotlanders or the new one, populists and nationalists against George Soros-style globalists. But I argue that the deepest division, if you look at all the movements in the last 50 years, political correctness, post-modernness, and the sexual

revolution, things like that. The deepest division is between those whose ideas of the Republic and, above all, of freedom, go back to the American Revolution, which was decisively Jewish and Christian coming from the Reformation, and those whose ideas of America and freedom go back, often with that, they're realizing it, to the French Revolution and the French enlightenment. And they have fundamentally different views of freedom, and they come out in very different places. So America's at a kind of Rubicon moment. You remember after Caesar crossed the Rubicon, as Sissarro said, Rome was a Republican name only. That was the first reference to Rhino. And it's not just Republicans in name only, but America would be a republic in the founder's sense

in name only if the ideas from the French Revolution were. to prevail. Interesting. Well, so those two definitions of liberty. Can you flesh that out for us a bit? What really are the two visions? Well, you have to look at the two revolutions. For example, their sources are quite different. One's from the Bible, Jewish and Christian roots, the other from the French Enlightenment. But they have very different anthropologies. For example, the American Revolution, with its notions of checks and balances, ambition, counteracting ambition, separation of powers has a very realistic view of human nature. The French Revolution, utopian.

You know, Russo, man is born free, everywhere in chains, remove the chains, will all be happy, free and fulfilled. And you see that in the sexual revolution, someone like Charles Reich, you know, the architect of the term sexual revolution, if we all have five orgasms a week, as he puts it, we'll all be happy free and fulfilled. And this is utopian nonsense. So that's only the beginning of the differences.

You know, Lord Acton's great description, freedom is either the permission to do what you like or the power to do what you ought. Obviously, the American Revolution was the second. The French Revolution was largely the first. And you write that this conflict over these two visions of liberty is producing what you say is the greatest crisis since the Civil War in America. How do you see, you mentioned the sexual revolution,

obviously permutations of this conflict, over time, but in our current time, how do you see this really taking shape and who do you think is winning? Well, think of this year, 2018. It's 50 years on from Rudy Deutsche's call for a long march, Mao's term, through the institutions. In other words, win the hegemony, the head term of the elites. And you look at the world of colleges, universities, the press and media, and entertainment. They have largely been won by ideas which flow from 1789, not 1786. So you see the stifling, say, of free speech on campuses or the rebranding of religious freedom. It was once America's first liberty for the framers and many people since then. The last 20 years now, it's a code word for

bigotry and discrimination. You see very serious subversion of notions of freedom that the framers and many since them would have stood for. And within the American tradition, I want to ask you about this. You talk about the biblical tradition, the Judaic and Christian tradition. A lot of folks would also talk about Athens. What's the relationship in America between, I mean, they're so intertangled in so many of our minds, you know, folks pointing back to Athens and the classical idea of liberty, going back to Aristotle, but then the Bible as well, is it both or is it more one than the other?

Well, originally people would have talked about what they called the ancient liberties of the English, coming down from Magna Carta, which came across with the people in New England. But waspish or anti-waspish thinking threw that out in the 60s, and now we have the reaction to white privilege. So today, if you ask most Americans, where did freedom come from? They would say Athens. But you remember the framers were very chary, wary about Athenian democracy. It never lasted more than 50 years.

And even, say, Plato saw his master Socrates executed by the Democrats, not the oligarchs. So actually the framers didn't look to Athens. And historically, American freedom owes everything to the book of Exodus. Exodus is the master story of Western freedom. not just the rhetoric, let my people go, but notions such as covenantalism, which became constitutionalism. And many, many Americans have no idea, even many Jews and Christians who ought to know better, have no idea that their freedom actually came from the Reformation's rediscovery of the

book of Exodus. That's fascinating. And really, I encourage readers to get the book because you flesh that out in detail. Another question just about the current day, these two sides are pitted against each other, seemingly entrenched. What will it take to quell the crisis that your book describes as something like a cold civil war? Well, the difference between now and the time just before the Civil War is that there's no Lincoln. In other words, significance of Lincoln was not just his greatness, but the fact that he addressed the evils' slavery, which he tackled for. for 20 or 30 years, in the light of what he called the better angel of the American nature,

and he always appealed to the Declaration. And as he said, when he came to Washington through Philadelphia, all his ideas came from the document that came from that building. And he finishes, quoting Psalm 137, may my right hand forget its cunning, and may my mouth cleave to the, my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget these teachings. In other words, he was like Martin Luther King, who called the Declaration a promissory note. So from Lincoln right through to King, you can see Americans believed in the Declaration. But following that long march, America today is chronically racist, sexist, hegemonic, and all sorts of nasty terms.

In other words, King appealed to the promissory note, the Declaration, but Stokely Carmichael and many in the Black Lives Movement today don't have any. even say the kneeling controversy, the disrespect for the anthem and the flag and the declaration and the pledge are all part of that disappearance of the promissory note. So these things are playing out today. In other words, many of the people on the liberal left, without their realizing in some cases, are actually supporting another revolution, not the American revolution. You know, a lot of Americans who would consider themselves to be conservative, even Christian, would say that our greatest threat is always to our liberty from government.

Do you dispute that? Or do you take a somewhat different view of the greater? I mean, it seems like your book is arguing the greatest threat. You can't simply say government today. Right. Because what I'm describing is an ideology and a whole constellation of ideologies. But you've got other problems. For example, you've got versions of scientism, the idea that science is all of

is, which can never find freedom. So you look at saying a new atheist like Sam Harris, freedom is a fiction. Freedom is an illusion. And you've gone down the line. There are all sorts of people undermining a basic view of human freedom. Now, the fact is, you cannot find human freedom through science alone. You certainly can't find it in the Greeks. What was ultimate for them was fate even over the gods. You can't find it in the ancient religions like Mesopotamia and so on. It is only in the Jewish and Christian scriptures, the Bible. People are made in the image and likeness of God. God is sovereign. He wants free people to worship him freely, and that's the whole point of the exodus story. So actually the Bible is the deepest roots of the

foundation of freedom today, but the assaults come from all sorts of directions. We're moving not only into a post-truth world. There's a lot of talk of that. We're moving into a post-rights world. And part of that is the undermining of freedom. Yeah, it's so interesting because everyone seems to want to advance their own policies in the name of rights, but then everything becomes defined in terms of rights. And we forget how duties are attached to rights. Yes, absolutely. Well, final question for you here. This classical and Judeo-Christian view of liberty, how do we begin to restore that? Obviously, you're also a Christian theologian.

I'm not a theologian. Sorry, I hear you talk about theology, so I sometimes make that assumption. But you also a political and cultural observer, you know, absent a mass revival and return to Christianity, how do you see a path forward? Well, two political things are needed, and then one wider. First, leadership. We need someone like Lincoln with courage, with vision,

with a sense of history who can address the president problems in the light of the better angel and the Declaration of Independence. We don't have that. My 30-odd years here in Washington, I've only heard two on Capitol Hill ever use history. I grew up with Churchill. History should be a part of everyone's understanding of freedom. So leadership is a huge one. The president talks about make America great again.

He doesn't say what made it great in the first place. and it wasn't the economy, it wasn't the military, it was ideas, including freedom. The second thing we need at a lesser level, but it'll take longer, is the restoration of civic education, so that the public schools restore the teaching of the unum that balances the pluribus, a pluribus unum. And that's collapsed since the 1960s, and that's absolutely disastrous. Now, if you move beyond politics, I do think, as you suggested, we need to be. to see a revival in the Christian churches. The scandal of the American church is that it's a majority, but it has less cultural influence than groups that are a tiny percentage of its size,

such as, say, the LGBT people, 2% of America, and yet Christians, for a huge majority, have less cultural influence than, say, Christians. But that's a matter for Christians and Jews to be concerned about, a real revival and reformation in the believing community, so they can stand for freedom with real integrity. I'm curious you mentioned earlier the two people on Capitol Hill who did use history, and I'm with you on that. I would love to see a recovery of that. In fact, you go back and read Lincoln. It's amazing how he threaded the needle making his case for every move based upon an

interpretation of the founding, and it's such a coherence there. Who are the people who did that? I'm really curious. Well, I'm not here to praise or pick them out. You think of someone, say, even in the Kavanaugh hearings, the way Senator Ben Sass, who is a historian, used his first 15 minutes to give a kind of civics talk on the difference in the Congress and the Supreme Court. Now, we need that done at a much higher level. So I would encourage people like Senator Sass to address the current problems in the light of the American founding, the better angels, the declaration, and so on. Well, the book is called Last Call for Liberty, How America's Genius for Freedom Has to become its greatest threat.

Oskinez appreciates you taking the time. My pleasure. Thank you. Do conversations about the Supreme Court leave you scratching your head? Then subscribe to SCOTUS 101, a podcast breaking down the cases, personalities, and gossip at the Supreme Court. Well, time is short to watch all of the best Christmas movies before Christmas gets here in just a few days. Now, we could ask what the best Christmas movies of all time, are, but I think a more interesting question is what are the best Christmas villains of all time?

Here to discuss is our producer, Michael Gooden, along with two of our media colleagues from the Heritage Foundation, Matt Atwood and Laura Falcon. So who's the best Christmas villain? So the question on the table is, what are the greatest Christmas villains in Christmas movies of all time? So I think before we can accurately answer that, we have to go around the table here, and describe and define what constitutes a great villain to begin with. So, So my personal greatest villain of all time is in my favorite Christmas movie of all time. It's a wonderful life, Mr. Potter, the evil corporate, rich miser who makes everyone in Bedford Falls life a living hell. That's my personal Christmas villain that I think is the best.

What about you guys? So it's funny that you lead off with somebody who embraces kind of the spirit of selfishness, because that's what I always think of when I think of my Christmas villains. So perhaps my favorite villain, and they always typically will have a redeeming quality at the end of the movie. but you can't go wrong with Ebenezer Scrooge, classic Charles Dickens character. My favorite version was George D. Scott, of course. So I'm just going to jump in here

because the Grinch is definitely my favorite of all time. And it's so obvious how he hates Christmas actively. I think Scrooge, he just wants to get away from Christmas and doesn't like people celebrating it, but the Grinch, like, he's going to go in there and steal your presents just to make you unhappy. And that takes some real guts. and his heart is three sizes too small until the very end.

So I guess by the very end, he's no longer a villain. It's kind of interesting that the common thread among all great Christmas movie villains is that at their core, their spirit is antithetical to the meaning and spirit of Christmas to begin with. So let's look at the people that we are talking about here. We're talking about Mr. Potter, who only cares about money, he only cares about himself, does not care about giving to his fellow man or the spirit of Christmas. We have the Grinch who literally wants to break into your house and steal all. your stuff just so you can't enjoy the thing he hates to begin with. I like that I'm going to

actually modernize the group a bit because you guys are playing it all super old school. I'm going to go, actually, I don't know how new school National Lampoons Christmas vacation is, but I would say that it is more realistic in terms of all of the villains. My favorite is the boss that runs into Clark Griswold throughout the course of the movie. And that's because I feel like a lot of people have had that type of villain in their life, the horrible boss who doesn't know who you are, doesn't care about who you are, and then cuts Christmas bonuses for everybody instead of the jelly of the month. The jelly of the month club.

Everybody wants that for Christmas. I mean, I don't think it's that terrible. But I would rather have the Christmas bonus. And then at the very end, after Clark Riswell gives what I think is probably one of the greatest lines of insults in all of movie history, Cousinetti, our favorite Cousinette, goes out and kidnaps the boss from his home. And I'd like to know how they actually got away with that, or how he got away with that. brings him back with a big bow on his head, which is exactly what Clark wanted for Christmas.

And he comes back and says, oh, well, you know what? Maybe I was being a jerk. And his wife comes in and pretty much calls him a jerk. Yeah. And he gives, I think it was to everybody, but he specified to Clark, you are going to get a bonus that is 20% greater than what you got last year. And I think that plays into what Matt was saying, that there's a redeeming quality. And these characters have a selfish mindset, but then there is a redeeming quality at the end. And I think, I don't know, this is a little bit more realistic.

I don't think it's a problem if somebody forces you to have that come to Jesus moment. Because in the end, you still have to make a decision to change yourself. No one else can physically force you to act a certain way. So even though somebody may pressure you into being good, I mean, I feel like we've all experienced that. Our parents, although have all pressured us into doing things that we didn't want to do. And the hope is that that pressure will eventually push you to do it yourself. and that maybe you won't need that pressure in the future. Going back to the redeeming qualities and Laura bringing up the fact that we keep bringing up these old school movies.

So I like to bring in a more modern twist and talk about my Grinch of 2018, which is Disney. Basically, they have not only not released a new movie this year for Christmas, which leaves Star Wars Faithful pretty upset about that. But they've also kind of squanded their last big opportunities on the last two movies. So hopefully all the pressure will amount on Disney to create an actual, good Star Wars movie that comes out next year maybe and we can look forward to that in 2019. Let it be so.

Well, we're going to leave it there for today, but thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Daily Signal podcast, brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud, and please leave us a review or rating on iTunes

to give us any feedback. We'll see you again tomorrow. You've been listening to The Daily Signal podcast, executive produced by Kate Tranko and Daniel Davis. Sound design by Michael Gooden, Lauren Evans, and Thalia Rampersad.

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