Author and renegade historian Thaddeus Russell — visit ThaddeusRussell.com to check out his podcast, courses, and books.

Thaddeus Russell on the Totalitarianism of Pure Democracy

A Renegade Historian Revises America’s Founding Myths and Challenges the Conservative View of What’s Wrong with Academia

Bob Zadek

Published in

Liberation Day

27 min readJun 8, 2018

The Bob Zadek Show is a live, libertarian radio program broadcast throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and West Coast of the United States. You can stream it online, Sundays, from 8–9am PACIFIC, or subscribe to the podcast, and call in with your thoughts to (424) BOB-SHOW

On 6/10, Thaddeus Russell joined the show to discuss his book Renegade History of the United States.

Most mainstream accounts of U.S. history run something like this:

England was oppressing the colonies. Taxation without representation , etc. This sparked the American Revolution and the quest for self-governance, which began the long struggle for democratic freedom that has been continually redefined — first through a civil war and then through a protracted civil rights battle to extend the liberties first won for white males to all of “We the People,” including women and minorities.

At each step, it is said to be noble reformers and moral visionaries who took the courageous stand against oppressive forces of injustice and discrimination. This naive telling may explain how civil liberties such as the right to vote or to be heard in the public square were gained, but it neglects many of the freedoms that a majority of people seem to prefer to the lofty ideals of the founders. Namely, the freedom to do what one pleases.

Thaddeus Russell exploded the naive view of American history in his 2010 book, showing that it was the rogues and renegades — prostitutes, drunkards, and laggards — who often pioneered freedoms we now take for granted, such as a woman’s ability to walk somewhere unaccompanied, or have an identity apart from her husband. Consider the freedom to drink, gamble, and cavort with whomever one wishes (not to mention the freedom to take long lunch breaks and summer vacations). None of these were guaranteed in the Constitution, and if it were up to some of the influential colonial leaders, people today might be banned from even more innocuous activities like dancing and celebrating Christmas.

When Russell tried to share his perspective with his students at Barnard, his career was derailed. A talk that he delivered to his colleagues revealed that he wasn’t “one of them.” In other words, he wasn’t afraid to express unpopular opinions that offended the sensibilities of left-wing coastal elites.

To be sure, Russell is an equal-opportunity offender — dethroning sacred cows on both the left and the right. He joins the show of ideas, not attitude, this Sunday, to share his experience working at an Ivy-league university as a heterodox historian.

Transcript

“The subject of the book is essentially a 500-year battle between those who didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning and those who wanted them to get to bed in the morning.”
— Thaddeus Russell, on *Renegade History of the United States*

Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest running libertarian talk radio show on the west coast and in the country. Thanks so much for listening this Sunday morning. I’m delighted to welcome to our show Thaddeus Russell. Thaddeus Russell is a truly important, thoughtful observer of social and political life in America, and he brings to our show a point of view held by only a very few people. In my opinion, Thaddeus is right and they are wrong. You will decide for yourself.

I first learned about Thaddeus when I heard about his book, A Renegade History of the United States. In his view, much of the important political and social events in our country are not the result of the work of mainstream politicians or thinkers, but rather, in his words, “drunkards, laggards, and prostitutes.”

Thaddeus, this is an interesting point of view. Welcome to the show this morning.

Thaddeus Russell: Well, thanks for having me on Bob.

A Formative Upbringing in Berkeley, California

Bob Zadek: You are a favorite son, if you will, of the Bay Area. You grew up in Berkeley, California. Tell us if you will, about your early life, because it is relevant to your point of view. Help our audience understand how you arrived at this conclusion. What motivated you to write the book Renegade History and how did you become Thaddeus Russell, the person who you are today?

Thaddeus Russell: I wouldn’t say I’m a favorite of the Bay Area but I am a son of it. I was born and raised in Berkeley, California, as you said. I was born in 1965. And so my formative years were the 1970’s and early 1980’s, all in Berkeley. As you might imagine if you know anything about Berkeley at the time, it was full of what we might call “countercultural” and “radical” people, including my parents, who were all members of a revolutionary socialist organization.

My mother and stepfather actually devoted their lives for 10 years or more to organizing the working class for revolution, which meant that they dropped out of their upper-class lifestyles. Both were graduates of elite universities and came from respectable families, and could have had high paid professional careers, but instead they chose to work in factories or as clerical workers in order to organize the working class for a “socialist revolution.” So, they were part of a small organization of radical socialists, which was their social life as well. So they would hang out at our house and they would play poker every Saturday night at our kitchen table. They would lay out their weekly newspaper at our house. We also lived in the same neighborhood where the black panthers national headquarters was, which was actually in Berkeley. We were part of that milieu and many revolutionary socialists from Europe would often come through and stay with us and speak at our house. I was at a lot of meetings of their group. Then there is Berkeley generally, which at that time of course was very much full of hippies and ex-beatniks and sex, drugs, and Rock and Roll.

Bob Zadek: Thaddeus, I have been to Berkeley recently. It still is that.

Thaddeus Russell: Uh, no it is not. Berkeley is very different than when I was growing up. There is a lot more money there. There are certainly still some elements of the counterculture. You will see punk rockers on the street on Telegraph Avenue still panhandling, but it is a much wealthier place, a much more middle class place, and it is much more a place for young urban professional families. But yeah, you will still see some of that counter culture. What you will certainly see is very left wing politics, which is of course all around me and is still totally dominant, which makes it hard for me to go back, and makes me say that I’m not necessarily the favorite son of the place.

Bob Zadek: Well, Berkeley of course, statistically, has the highest percentage of Bentley’s with Bernie Sanders bumper stickers in the country.

Thaddeus Russell: Well, yeah, I think that is Mill Valley actually, where you are.

Bob Zadek: Mill Valley. Exactly.

Thaddeus Russell: Berkeley is certainly like that. A lot of champagne socialists over there.

So, that was my early years. I really liked one part of it, which was the countercultural part. I liked their attitudes about work and about patriotism and about identifying as Americans. I loved their ideas about sorts of personal freedom, individual freedoms, pleasure, sensual pleasure, drugs, sex, music, all of that I thought was great actually. And I also felt like they were emotionally intelligent people. When I say “hippies” I just mean people who were sort of interested in very countercultural ideas in the sixties and seventies, things that were out of the norm in terms of lifestyle, not just politics.

In fact, hippies were these people who were much more interested in living differently day to day than in what we would call “high politics.” There was not a whole lot of discussion about public policy or economic theory among the people I’m talking about here, but I just thought that they lived better than my parents comrades. People who were very much into high politics, formal politics, organizing social movements, stuff like that. I felt like they were very limited in their lives. Their interests were almost purely intellectual people — people of the mind. They were generally not very interested in things like popular culture, like what is on TV or sports or even having fun. Those were all secondary. They were wholly invested in remaking the world in the way that they thought it should be.

I just found that they were not fun people to hang out with even when I was a kid. It took me a while to figure that out but by the time I was in my early thirties, I actually sort of made the intellectual move and started to have ideas and tried to understand exactly what it was about socialism and socialists that I didn’t like. It turns out I didn’t like socialism. I think that actually produces people like my parents’ comrades, people who were sort of puritanical in a lot of ways, but more just sort of uninterested in the pleasures of life. In fact, that is why my mother and stepfather left the movement, because they were interested in material pleasures like food, travel, music, going to nice restaurants, etc. My mother liked jewelry and liked to have a beautiful house and flowers and art and all that.

An Ideological Shift Away from Socialism and Pure Democracy

Thaddeus Russell: I think they realized on some sort of emotional level that they didn’t fit in the movement either. So I think in a way, my subsequent career and ideas are a continuation of their moving away from the asceticism of politics and socialism.

By the way, this is applies not just to socialists. Libertarians are pretty much just as bad in my experience. They tend to be of the mind — they’re intellectuals like me. I’m not judging, I’m just stating a fact here. This means that generally speaking they are more interested in abstractions and ideas than they are in their bodies. So, that’s the origin of my book, which is about people who lived in history according to immediate desires of the body, like gratification or sensual pleasure. Things like drinking, leisure, and sex. They were over social responsibilities.

These are the renegades in the book and those are the people that I argue actually made history in a lot of good ways simply by doing things they weren’t supposed to do in a puritanical culture, which the United States very much was in the 18th and 19th century. For example, a woman dancing in public in the 19th century, by herself or with friends, was not respectable at all. Prostitutes were the first to do that and then it became standard. Now it’s completely normal for the women to do things like that to dance and smoke in public. Prostitutes made very high wages and owned private property as the owners of brothels in expensive places like San Francisco…

Bob Zadek: Yeah, and Sausalito.

Thaddeus Russell: I don’t know about Sausalito but they were certainly across the Barbary coast area. So I think that’s the connection. It took me about 20 years to make the connection. But I did find the idea for Renegade History after I had gotten my PhD at Columbia University in American History.

Socialism is terrifying. It may be be my worst nightmare. I think libertarians have very good critiques of it. They tend to be more concerned about efficiency and production and lack of incentives and, and that sort of good economic argument. I think libertarians are correct in their critiques and socialism entirely. It’s just that that’s not so much my concern.

“Socialism is terrifying. It may be be my worst nightmare.”

My primary concern is that it requires constant work. It requires a merger of your identity with the nation state. You are now responsible for all of it. This is full democracy. This is the problem with democracy. Not only do you have your neighbors ruling over you, but you are also the ruler, and being the ruler, it sucks. It is a non-stop responsibility when the nation-state is truly in your hands. There is just a tremendous amount of work and you have to understand so much to do even the slimmest job of governing.

My primary concern is that [pure democracy] requires constant work. It requires a merger of your identity with the nation state. You are now responsible for all of it. This is full democracy. This is the problem with democracy.

Bob Zadek: I think you really nailed it when you pointed out that there’s a strange contradiction. Socialism requires a top-down, total control, at least economically, but it bleeds over into the political command and control, with no room for individuality.

Thaddeus Russell: Well, that is not exactly what I am saying. Socialism is not top-down. True socialism is even worse. Top-down socialism, like in the Soviet Union, had quite a lot of slacking off at work because the workers weren’t actually invested psychologically in the projects so they had to be commanded from Moscow. True socialism, and this has never happened, but I will respect it just as a theory. I will say it is possible and that it could happen and I’ve seen there have actually been instances of of what anybody would call true “pure socialism,” which were actually in some of the organizations in the sixties and seventies on the radical left. Not the ones that my parents were involved in, but the biggest student movement group in the sixties was the students for democratic society, which was quite well known and very large, and they were known for having meetings within the group to make decisions.

They were known for having meetings that lasted for days because that is what it requires, right? Participatory Democracy, which is what socialism is, where every person actually has a say in every major decision. It takes an incredible amount of time and work, and so you have to actually devote your life to the collective, the entity, the social life of the state or to the organization. Whatever is being operated or managed collectively. It requires all of the people within this to give over their own individual interests to the collective.

Everyone should watch a documentary made by Naomi Klein, a leftist who loves the idea of the collective ownership of property and worker management and socialism. She did a documentary film called The Take about a factory in Argentina that was abandoned by the owner and the workers there took it over and managed it themselves as a workers’ cooperative and workers’ collective. She interviews the workers and they talk about how wonderful it is that now at the end of their regular eight-hour shift on the factory floor, they have another four to six, or sometimes eight hours of meetings, to manage the factory. Naomi Klein and these workers thought this was wonderful. I mean, if working all day on a factory and then being a corporate manager for another eight hours is your idea of utopia then there is my argument against socialism. No, thank you. I mean if you want to do that be my guest, but you’re never going to make me do that.

I mean, if working all day on a factory and then being a corporate manager for another eight hours is your idea of utopia then there is my argument against socialism. No, thank you.

Bob Zadek: In your book there is this quote which is relevant to what you just said. You said in your book, “The Founding Fathers understood what we now choose to ignore. Democracy is the enemy of personal freedom.” You just now explained that when you have democracy, it requires you to turn over your individual decisions about your life, as Madison observed, to the tyranny of the majority. That, just because 51 percent of the voters decide you ought to do something or not do something, you have signed onto the principal that this determines what you are going to do. This is the subordination of your personal freedom or autonomy to the 51%. I did a show about 10 years ago, and the title was “What’s so special about majority rule?” You sort of summed it up better than I did in your book.

Thaddeus Russell: Madison’s argument is different than mine. I think I agree with him on that particular point, and I agree with classical liberal arguments against democracy, which has to do with majority rule and the dictatorship of the majority. That is a good argument that I completely agree with, but I’m making a different argument that it is totalitarian in a different way. It is totalitarian psychologically. By the way, another example is the town hall meetings in New England. Ask anybody who has lived in Vermont for a long time and has really been part of that. They’ll tell you they spend a huge amount of their life in those town hall meetings, making decisions, studying things.

So people complain all the time about how undemocratic Americans are, meaning that they just don’t care much. They don’t do much. They vote once every four years, maybe at best, and only half of them do that. So, then the question is, what would it mean for Americans to be much more democratic? What would it mean for the United States to be radically democratic? The way that socialists think it should be. That means the people, as a whole — all of them, individually — are responsible for every decision that’s made. What is produced by businesses. Each product. This is a question for me and you and everybody.

Even whether there should be these products is a question for me and you and everybody. What does that mean? That means the first thing you and I have to do is start researching everything about the world, because we have to make decisions about it. So it’s just an endless amount of work.

The more democratic you are, the more work you’re going to do, and the less of an individual you will be. You’re no longer Thaddeus Russell. You are now a member of the democratic polity. Even if you’re going to just make your neighborhood truly democratic, that means that each person there must decide whether there should be a stop sign stop light, whether they need to repave the road, etc. There are infinite decisions to be made even in the smallest jurisdiction. Everybody there would be working, studying, reading, planning and meeting all the time. It does not sound fun.

Bob Zadek: It would be no fun at all. In fact, the book that I wrote, which summarizes some of my shows, was that our country right now has, in my opinion, too much democracy. We are drowning in democracy to our collective detriment.

The Ongoing Civil War between Puritanism and Hedonism

Bob Zadek: What is interesting, and what you explain about life in Berkeley during the end of the hippie or countercultural movement — and the hedonistic pleasures that were promoted in Berkeley and other places at the time — is that your generation, if you will, to some degree, has now “matured,” and now they populate a large community that you are quite familiar with, which is college campuses. Here they are, coming after this free-speech movement which preceded you in the early sixties in Berkeley. Here they are now populating college campuses and their attitude is profoundly different than those antecedents. You have had some direct experience on college campuses, so share that experience briefly with us, if you will. And what, in your opinion, happened to those ideals that you described in your youth in Berkeley?

Thaddeus Russell: Well, I don’t know. I think it’s true that the political discourse coming out of college campuses — in particular students by the way — is conservative. The hysteria recently about sexual assaults on college campuses, and in particular, the calls for reforms against sexual assault have been puritanical and obviously conservative. So there’s that.

In my experience, what is not said publicly about the way that students lead their lives, and what they do, is actually quite hedonistic in different ways. Kids I’ve taught at least — and I have taught at five different colleges and universities on both coasts — I think they spend a lot of time playing video games, I think that they have a lot of sex, and in fact I know they do because of STD rates on campuses.

I wouldn’t say they are great proponents of work ethic. I think that they are far more tolerant of alternative lifestyles than previous generations, even the hippie generation. I think the trans movement is part of that. So it is kind of a mix.

The thing is that the political discourse — and this is a contradiction in this generation that they have to work out themselves — is highly puritanical. It is a left wing puritanism: the idea that sex is dangerous and harmful no matter what, that women are vulnerable to sexual predation by men. That women need protection by institutions and the state, that there needs to be specific regulations about every sexual activity in a bedroom. This is what the has been put in place in many colleges, these consent rules. I mean that’s all straight out of Victorian America.

This is the most conservative set of ideas and policies you could have for women and people generally. So, there is a very strange contradiction. That is the contradiction that I saw in the 1980s, which was Antioch College, which was basically the Berkeley of colleges. It was very left-wing, radical, anarchists and hippies and punk rockers, and socialists, and transgender people, and gays, and lesbians. It was really hedonistic and libertine, but on the other hand, really fiercely and viciously, puritanical. Sometimes there would be a sort of outburst of this, when someone would be accused of being a racist or rapist or sexist, and there would be a Salem Witch Trial-like atmosphere, and someone might get suspended or expelled or ostracized.

So, there are these contradictions within people, and the contradictions are especially stark with Americans.

I also think this is true for Americans generally. I don’t think it’s just the weirdos that I hung out with when I was a kid and in college. I think Americans always have simultaneously within them a little Cotton Mather, the great Puritan minister, and are hedonists, so they are are always fighting against each other.

When your alarm clock goes off in the morning, you have a fight between the two. I think the vast majority of us do. I think very few people are happy when their alarm clock goes off and it’s time to go to work. The vast majority of us in that moment struggle. There is a struggle between the Puritan and the hedonist. The Puritan says go to work and the hedonist says to stay in bed. So this is the eternal and constant war within us. I talk about this civil war on a social level in my book.

The subject of the book is essentially a 500-year battle between those who didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning and those who wanted them to get to bed in the morning. The moralizers and social guardians on the one hand and the hedonists, the rabble, the motley crew, as John Adams called them, the drunkards, the laggards, the prostitutes, the slaves, the pirates, all those. That is the civil war that has been going on between those groups of people and also inside each of us.

So the point of the book is not to say that we should have no rules or governors or social managers. I’m glad that there are certain people want to do that work. I certainly don’t want to. But, generally speaking in this country, those people have been very powerful and it has been actually a very orderly and quite repressed society in a lot of fundamental ways society ever since its founding. So, the United States is not in any danger of devolving into an anarchic chaos as far as I can tell.

Pure Democracy: Another Word for Totalitarianism?

Bob Zadek: I think the danger is the opposite. You have pointed out in many interviews you have given to others that there is a very interesting political split in this country, not between blue and red, and not between Democrats and Republicans. That distinction is totally artificial. The real distinction, as you have pointed out, is between those who favor an authoritarian, a big brother powerful state controlling everything, and those who favor freedom. Authoritarian versus freedom. The mainstream Democrats and Republicans are both intoxicated with, in my opinion, this heady power that can accumulate over the individual. So, the split is in both parties, there are those who a recoil from authoritarianism and those who favor it because they think they know better. And that is really the split in this country is not this phony Democrats and Republicans. There is no such thing as a “Democratic philosophy” or Republican philosophy.” There are no philosophers who Democrats support or who Republicans follow. There is no such thing. It is simply power on the one hand or freedom on the other.

Isn’t that what’s happening?

And it looks like, Trump being a recent example, that in the short run, at the federal level, authoritarianism seems to be winning. It may be different at the state level, but at the federal level authoritarianism seems to be on the rise. Do you disagree?

Thaddeus Russell: I like to use two terms: one is authoritarian and one is totalitarian. For me, the difference is that authoritarianism is blunt, coercive rule, often physically violent power. Totalitarianism is convincing the people that they are responsible for society, and gets the citizens to psychologically invest in the nation. I think that Trump is more authoritarian than totalitarian because he has gotten almost no one to agree with him. He has the entire national media pretty much, and almost the entire national political establishment, and all of academia, completely hostile from the beginning. America is not in any danger at all of going into fascism and totalitarianism. There are fewer Americans now who are invested in their country than ever before, which, by the way, I think is one very nice byproduct of the Trump administration.

So, he is an authoritarian. Authoritarians tend to be dumb. They tend to try to control people simply by whipping them or imprisoning them or killing them, and that is his impulse. Now he hasn’t done much of that, I think mostly because he’s simply unable to, but I think he has authoritarian impulses, at least verbally and rhetorically. And he is completely ineffective because authoritarianism in general tends to be ineffective. It tends to cause revolts and rebellions, and ends with the King’s head getting chopped off.

The much bigger problem in this country for me is totalitarianism. I’d say the New Deal era was a pretty totalitarian era. I’d say McCarthyism in the 1950s was fairly totalitarian So, I’m not going to say this has ever been a truly totalitarian society, but there certainly have been moments when it’s been pretty close. That has always been a strong tendency in American culture. I mean, the puritans, the founders of this culture were of course, totalitarian. They made sure everybody was behaving properly and according to God’s rules all the time. You had moral guardians of all kinds and many of them were religious Christians. In the first and second great awakening the evangelicals would tell Americans that they were sinners and giving them all the reasons why they should reform themselves immediately. After the revolution you had the rise of professional police, professional firefighters, the drive of asylums for women and children. You had the rise of prisons in which prisoners were monitored. They were watched.

The Draft: Totalitarianism in America

Thaddeus Russell: Then you also had the rise of Democracy, after the revolution. This is a country by the people, so you see a shift in the culture. Now, fortunately I would say that most Americans didn’t really buy into it, but a significant percentage did start talking about America as “me” or “us,” and begin to identify with America. They became much more willing to volunteer for wars. During the American revolution there were just a tiny handful of men who volunteered to fight on the side of the Patriots. So they had to resort to conscription almost immediately. After the revolution, this democratic idea actually did get into the heads of a lot of men, so that there were always enough to fight wars. So you have decreased resistance to the draft. That’s another thing people don’t know, which is that every single American war required a conscription or draft to make it happen. Anyways, you do have a decline in resistance to the draft after the American Revolution.

Bob Zadek: If I may make one side note about the draft, you are quite right that there always has been a draft, but there’s an interesting aspect of the draft both during the American revolution and during the civil war, which is that if you were drafted as a young man, you were permitted to hire somebody to go in your place. In effect, those who served in the army were not middle-class whatever middle class was in those days, or upper-middle class. They just bought their way out. They hired somebody to serve for them. It was kind of an interesting little known aspect about the draft and that caused riots during the Civil War, because it was a poor person’s war. Rich and middle class people didn’t have to fight. So it was not pure patriotism. In effect, it was a tax, which wealthy people could pay and poor people, instead of going to jail, would fight.

Thaddeus Russell: This is true. But I would say that this is still the time when there is a significant number of middle and upper class people volunteering. There is a real democratic ethos. There is a real democratic ethos in America during the Civil War and even well into the 20th century which we don’t really have anymore. If you look at a lot of the generals and a lot of the officers who lost their arms or legs or heads in battles in the Civil War, they almost all came from wealthy or established families. So that is why 600,000 died and why many came home missing a limb or an eye.

So that’s actually the ultimate product of democracy. You are going to go to war and you’re going to kill and die, because that is the ultimate democratic commitment. Nonetheless, there has always been a significant minority who have resisted draft conscription and I document those in Renegade History and also in the book that I am working on now actually. We don’t talk about the draft resisters and we assume they are shameful. I’m trying to make them into heroes. To me, every single draft resistor in this country’s history is a national hero.

Bob Zadek: Another little known fact about the draft is that the leading thinker in our country who helped us get rid of it was Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman spoke and wrote eloquently about the draft being a bad idea in terms of a political process and an economic process. He abhorred the draft and when he threw his considerable intellectual weight behind the idea, it helped us get rid of the draft.

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah, I think he said that it is the worst thing a state can do. I wouldn’t disagree with that. We need to talk about the draft for what it really is, which is temporary enslavement. You are being forced by the State to put your life on the line. I mean it’s been there in every war except for the Iraq war. This tells you something about how committed Americans have been to these wars. I said there was a pretty high level of commitment, but ever since then in the Spanish American War, World War One, World War Two — two thirds of the soldiers who fought in World War Two were conscripts. Korea and Vietnam all depended on drafts for them to happen.

So, whose foreign policy has it been? Whose wars have those been? Have those been the people’s wars? It is hard to make that argument. I think they all dependent upon a draft for them to happen.

Bob Zadek: I find the concept of a “popular” war to be strange.

Thaddeus Russell: Well, some wars have been popular. I think there have been countries where there were high rates of enlistments and voluntary enlistments for certain causes or certain moments but I don’t think that it has been very common. I’ve been doing research on the World War II recently and realized that every single country that was involved in World War Two had universal conscription. Every single one of them. So World War Two, in which 65 million people died, was not really a “popular” war either, since every single army required enslavement.

Bob Zadek: What is the alternative to conscription? You have to hire soldiers. Who is going to take the job of being a soldier? The people who do not have a better economic alternative, which means it’s the lowest rungs on the economic ladder who will take that job because they cannot get any other job. So, conscription assures, at least on paper, that rich people have to fight alongside poor people, and without conscription you end up with massive social unrest because only poor people are fighting the battles.

Thaddeus Russell: Yes, but that has not happened because we have had a voluntary army since Vietnam, made up almost exclusively of poor, working class people. Now we have a volunteer army.

As Friedman said, I cannot imagine a worse thing than the idea of being forced by the government to fight in a war that I oppose. There are very few things that would cause me to actually take up arms against my own country, but that might be one thing.

Final Thoughts: Demystifying Obama’s Position on Drugs

Bob Zadek: Well, I’m glad we don’t have a draft anymore because you’d be subversive and I would be arrested for having you on my show. We would both be in a heap of trouble.

One thing I never understood about the last administration, is that Obama came from a very progressive background, having antecedents in Berkeley more or less. He was a student or a friend of Saul Alinsky. Given that background, how can you explain Obama’s aggressive attack on drug dispensaries? Why did he pick a fight with drug dispensaries in California, which were lawful under California law? Drug policy is a pretty ugly in our country. Incarceration falls heavily on poor people on blacks and other minorities. So that would seem to be something where he took the exact opposite position I would have predicted. Can you give us any insight on what accounted for this?

Thaddeus Russell: I have never seen any evidence of the decision making with Eric Holder and Barack Obama in their meetings about this. I am dying to know but I’ve never seen any reporting on it. So, Barack Obama grew up fairly famously in Hawaii as a pot smoker, and then he went to Occidental College in Los Angeles, which was where I taught for a while, and was seen as a pot smoker there. In fact, he might have even dealt pot when he was a student there, but he certainly smoked it.

Then he goes to Columbia Law School and decides to reform himself because he is ashamed of the way he had been living, and changed his name from Barry to Barack, and has lived a fairly abstemious life except for the cigarette smoking ever since. You know, Barack Obama is the paragon of American discipline, right? He’s the perfect American citizen isn’t he? I think that his policies were a part of his renunciation of his former self as a past smoker. But I think, more deeply, he was disciplining local or state insubordination.

Bob Zadek: It was the Federal Government versus the state. I want to thank you so much. Good luck with the Renegade University. You can follow Thaddeus at ThaddeusRussell.com.

This is Bob Zadek saying so long for now.

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Addendum

Why Do We Work?

Much of A Renegade History challenges the puritanical obsession with work — later described by Max Weber as the “Protestant work ethic” — that turns out to be essential to the Founders’ vision for a functioning free society. Counter-intuitively, the freedom enabled by democracy actually requires far more discipline than a master would typically demand of their slaves. Freed slaves, Russell notes, often worked harder in their new jobs in the North than they did on plantations.

Furthermore, in a chapter titled “The Freedom of Slavery,” he claims that slaves enjoyed pleasures that were forbidden for white people. Far from defending the institution of slavery, Russell’s point is that following the civil war, the culture among former slaves frequently provided an important source of resistance to the oppressive culture of white Americans — a culture that put labor on a pedestal, and made it the reason for living, rather the means to living.

In his own life, however, Russell values work highly. He spoke with Reason’s Nick Gillespie about his own mission of challenging the Federal process of university accreditation. He is doing so through “unregistered” courses in history and philosophy, offered through his very own Renegade University. Russell also keeps busy with the Unregistered Podcast, but he will remind you that these pursuits are all a means to an end, not an end in and of themselves.

Is Postmodernism a Threat to Liberty?

Part of what makes Russell such an effective challenge to academia is that he cannot be put into a box. He’s clearly not reactionary, and he even shares an ally with postmodern thinkers typically cheered by the radical left.

If you’ve been following the news around freedom of expression on college campuses, you’ve probably seen stories about young, zealous “Social Justice Warriors,” who have a meltdown when confronted with a perspective that challenges their previous indoctrination — courtesy of politically correct humanities departments. Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson is perhaps the best-known opponent of this trend, for refusing to be silenced by students, administrators, or media personalities on the question of transgender pronouns (a kind of compelled speech because of Canada’s new laws).

Peterson has argued that the vaguely defined but sinister ideological movement known as postmodernism is responsible for the destruction of western norms, including free speech and even logic itself. While the ideas behind postmodernism cannot be written down and codified, they share some broad traits such as skepticism of all “metanarratives,” such as those that would place “enlightened man” at the center of history, as told within a story of unrelenting progress.

Peterson has described postmodernism as a unified ideology espoused incompletely by many individuals, none of whom perfectly embody or even understand the whole set of doctrines. However, collectively they are pushing a complete worldview, that is the inheritor of the Marxist system for analyzing struggles between the economic classes. Instead of looking at power relationships through an economic lens, postmodernists have shifted their focus to identity politics (perhaps in part because of the horrific failures of communism in the Soviet Union and China).

Russell, however, identifies post-modernism as one of the greatest achievements of academia to date, offering a course through Renegade University titled, “What is Postmodernism?”. He says that thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault are being abused when their theories are applied to enforce totalitarian ideals or compelled speech. Instead, postmodernism is supposed to free humanity from alleged social constructs, including race, class, and gender, so that we can become more responsible for our own fate.

Michel Foucault, one of the leading thinkers of postmodernism.

Russell believes that the real problem in academia is the cowardice on the part of tenured professors to say and research what they want, rather than what they know will be safe and acceptable to their suprisingly like-minded colleagues (recall that Democratic professors outnumber Republicans 10 to 1).