Catastrophe at Cambridge – Jason Arday and the Scandal at DEI | The American Mind Podcast

Hello, and welcome once again to the American Mind podcast. I'm your host, Spencer Clavin, Associate Editor of the Claremont Review of Books and 100% non-plagiarist editor of the American Mind. It turns out that's a rare distinction in today's academic landscape, as we will be discussing down the road. We are going to talk about the Jason Arday scandal, the rolling, unfolding debacle of Jason Arday's exposure. But first, I am joined this week by Managing Editor Mike Szabo. Our publisher and President Ryan Williams is out doing the Lincoln Fellowship, another one of our flagship educational enterprises here at the Claremont Institute. More on that in due course. I would like to tell you about, attend the tale of Jason Arday. If you have not already heard this man's name, you will soon know him as the youngest black professor at the University of Cambridge in its history, or at least that is how his fans and supporters would have liked you to know him up until very recently. Nowadays, you may go down as one of the all-time great English frauds. I saw him called a classic English flim-flam man the other day. This is, I think, pretty accurate. I'm going to be working here in this segment with the New York Times story about Arday because it's one of those topics that the Times has been shamed into covering. It was something that nasty conservatives who were probably racist were saying and talking about. It was something that Cambridge and the Times and all attendant media were keen to dismiss, but they really had to talk about it. In this piece, which you can find, again, on the Times website, it's called Questions Mount over a star scholar's life and career. In this piece, you get a flavor for what a pathological liar Arday seems to be by how early the Times has to introduce skepticism into its copy. If you're reading a newspaper article, obviously you have the moment where they're like, so-and-so says, and that's where you know they couldn't fact-check. The rest of the stuff they're going to tell you in the voice of the reporter, but now this is just sources say or whatever. Usually, you get a couple graphs after the lead of just like, here's the information that we're able to confirm, and now we get into the differing reports or whatever about this story. In this case, this Times story has a sentence and a half of verifiable information about Jason Arday before it has to start defaulting to Arday says, because so many things about Arday's life and story have turned out to be fiction. They're just lavish fabrication on the part of this con artist. I'll read you just the opening. For Jason Arday, it has been a breathtaking climb to the top of the ivory tower. Okay, fact. That is true. He was raised in South London by Ghanaian immigrant parents. Apparently, that's confirmed. Now, Arday says, so we're already in the realm of speculation, and here are some of the things that Arday says about himself. He says he was diagnosed with autism at age three, was nonverbal until he was nearly 12, and couldn't read or write until he was 18. He went on to get his PhD in education and claims to have had to relearn the contents of his dissertation weeks before defending it after losing his memory following the removal of a benign brain tumor. I've seen clips of him claiming to have been on the documentary Seven Up, which is time bound. It was a documentary shot every seven years, and Arday is nowhere close to the age range for that to be true. In the time story, we learn about his claim that he... Arday has also told the press that his academic success has brought darker attention, including the delivery of a severed pink's head to his parents' home. That's obviously awful if true. It also feels a lot like a Jussie Smollett type story. The other character that comes to mind here as a comparison, of course, is Claudine Gay, middle name Fake Ann, who was wrapped up in the Harvard scandal when Christopher Rufo and others discovered that her work contained major plagiarism, not the occasional unattributed source, but chunks of airlifted text that had been drag and dropped into this academic work by Claudine Gay. There ensued a hilarious, not as hilarious as the Arday, but a hilarious kind of falderal about, well, academics were coming forward and saying, don't all of us sometimes fudge a little bit? Who amongst us hasn't just copy-pasted a giant hunk out of somebody else's work and put it unattributed into our own? Then many people, including myself, would raise their hand and say, I did not do that when I wrote my PhD thesis. Arday's thesis seems to be basically a patchwork quilt of plagiarized material. I'm only exaggerating a little bit. It's also illegible, which speaks to a part of this that I'd like us to get into. Obviously, this is an indictment of Cambridge. Arday himself, as a con artist, is more of a the social sciences, but any field which has become a proving ground for racial grievance theory, for CRT and for DEI. All these things that, ooh, those nasty conservatives are always getting so up in arms about. Why have you made a bogeyman out of these obscure academic areas? This is why. Because the standards of departments which adopt these principles visibly collapse before our eyes, and you end up with these embarrassing scandals. Simon & Schuster is set to publish Arday's memoir next week. We will see if that materializes, but it's amazing to contemplate. Simon & Schuster, major publishing house. This is one of the big publishing houses in the country, and indeed the world, because he's in the UK, I should say. This is a huge book deal that he's cut, which will now probably collapse, I have to imagine. Then there's the question of how much of the social sciences and the humanities at prestige institutions have just become this? How representative is Arday? Obviously, he's an extreme case. Obviously, not everybody is out here making up brain tumors. If he's making them up, maybe he really had a brain tumor. I don't know. A lot of this stuff is verifiably made up. Not everybody's doing that. How many high-profile academics have founded their careers on great inflation, on being lauded for whatever demographic attribute they have, the color of their skin, their sex, whatever, while putting out low-quality, amateur-quality work? This is the kind of thing that I think if Cambridge takes this seriously, they will perform massive soul-searching and internal review about how this was ever allowed to happen and who else has been unjustly and unduly elevated in this way. More likely that won't happen and renegade institutions like UATX and Hillsdale and so forth will continue to scoop up better and better students because this is the kind of clown show that high-profile institutions are making of themselves. Mike, what do you think will come of this whole scandal? Just in general, isn't it hilarious? I guess that's my question. It is, and it's another just sad indictment just on the state of academia. This is the world that DEI, affirmative action, all these things kind of created, and it's just a shame and it's unfortunate. I was thinking as you were talking, the obvious connection to Ibram X. Kendi and McGriff, he ran, and it's just insane. This is Kendi cubed. I mean, it's that much worse. The scholar Nathan Kofnes, I think is how you say his name, who found this, he published a newsletter recently with dozens of excerpts. I'm reading from the New York Times story of Arday's 2015 PhD dissertation that had been flagged by plagiarism detection software, presenting them side by side with passages from a 2009 dissertation by another scholar. The passages from Arday's dissertation appear to copy verbatim or only lightly paraphrase the other scholar's work. Kofnes asserted that Cambridge tried to cover up and quash criticism of Arday's academic record. This part's great. And also questioned the veracity of details of Arday's life story, including his claim to have once run 30 marathons in 35 days. Unbelievable. Is that physically possible? I mean, is that even physically possible? So this just shows what kind of a clown show some of our most academic, supposedly elite institutions have fallen into. Just like what Christopher Rufo obviously showed with the whole controversy with Claudine Gay, who is, she's not, you know, not present anymore, but I know she's still at her university. She's still there. People, I assume there's some people that still, you know, take her seriously. But this is just such an indictment just on, again, the, you know, you have the replicability, that crisis, you have the crisis, you know, social science. Are these papers, you know, who cares if they're peer reviewed, but are they actually true? Can we actually go back and, you know, actually do these scientific experiments and actually have them come out, is what the author said. But this is kind of what happens when you have a regime that's not really built on any kind of, you know, natural talent, ability, skill, you know, meritocracy. I know that that word can be, you know, used in a good way and in some bad ways. We're actually publishing Russ Green of Total Boomer Luxury Communism fame actually on the idea of meritocracy very soon. So you'll see his great critique, very well thought out and very reasoned. But this idea that there's merit, that you have talent, and these things are basically built on what Jefferson talked about, a natural aristocracy of skills, of these things, and not just you look at, you know, the person, what they look like, what their skin color is, and you automatically, you know, think about, oh, you know, certain privileges and certain rights and certain things that certain people have and that other people don't or that they should be taken away. And so this is the problem when you descend into this kind of race-obsessed, you know, kind of project and experiment. You get what you get is something that's not academic, that's not scholarly. You elevate, you know, basically what Roger Scruton said about the new left, you know, fools and frauds into these positions. And then you watch as they obviously, you know, implode, and you just have to wonder again. The same thing, Spencer, you brought up comes into my mind. I mean, this is one man, Jason Arne, how many more people are in Cambridge or in Oxford are just populating these supposedly elite institutions? And then another thing that comes up, I heard Michael Anton, I think it might have been in a piece or in a talk, I can't remember, but he talked about, you know, how, you know, you have our professors who are amazing guys. And then you think of those professors who knew even more, and those professors who knew even more were even more well-read, new languages. And you just think of kind of the general decline. And it's like, this is where it's ended up to, you know, a guy who, you know, I mean, again, could be the professor of, you know, found in Mike Judge's Idiocracy, where it's just, this is the trajectory, this is where we've ended with. And that, you know, we need to do something quite drastic for the universities and colleges to make this stop and reverse course. Quite so. And I want to say something about how we got here, because whenever you start pointing at figures like Ardei and noting that there happens to be a whole heck of a lot of them, whenever you start talking about this stuff, your opponents of conservatives will say, oh, those right-wingers, they're making this big fuss over DEI, ooh, scary bogeyman, and they take these slogans and phrases and they make them uncool to say, right? CRT, that's just a fake made-up thing. It's an academic theory you don't even understand, and now it's been ginned up into a public crisis, into a moral panic. And you always hear this whenever we raise this as a problem. And to that, I want to say, okay, then you tell me what I should name the system that elevated Jason Ardei to his position of extraordinary prestige, right? And indeed, power. You tell me what got him there and what I should call it, because I'll call it whatever you want. I don't care. I mean, DEI was made up by the people that thought it was a good idea. So call it the Kwong theory, or call it elevating blockheads to position of power, EBPP. I will literally use any name that you want me to use, but something is happening that causes people like Claudine Gaye and Jason Ardei to end up in these situations for which they are manifestly unqualified, which embarrasses them and everybody else that is involved. It is good for absolutely nobody. Nobody is benefited by it. And it is consistent with the stated philosophy of many people who make these hiring decisions at these institutions. Again, call it DEI, call it magic racial fairy dust, call it whatever you want to call it, call it race communism if you like, but something is going on, right? I want to read to you a statement by the University of Cambridge about race, right? This is the university statement by the University of Cambridge on racial discrimination. And it's from Professor Stephen J. Toop, I think is the name of the author. I want Cambridge to be a leader in defending equality and fostering inclusion. Our own research tells us that we have much work to do to improve the experience of many of our BAME staff and students. This is black, Asian, and minority ethnic, one of these acronyms, to diversify our recruitment and our curriculum, to ensure that our courses are inclusive, and to achieve greater representation of BAME staff in senior leadership and in government structures. What does that mean? It means that the university is committed to making race a factor in its hiring and admissions and its promotional process. That is the plain meaning of that text. It's not particularly confusing or difficult to read. It doesn't take great reading comprehension, and it's not being hidden. It's being stated outright that that is a way that Cambridge wants to approach these matters. You can call that DEI. You can call it plain stupidity. Whatever it is, it's anti-meritocratic. It's against the idea that we should hire the best people for the best jobs and elevate people to positions where they are most competent. It's the opposite of that idea. And it is a disservice to competent and excellent black intellectuals. It is a disservice to white intellectuals who are then passed over for jobs that they would otherwise be qualified for on the basis of their race. It's an injustice. It is fundamentally opposed to what we believe to be the reality of justice in the West, which is that it does not actually emerge out of somebody's skin color, but is related directly to truth and excellence. All of that is denied outright by the philosophy, call it whatever you want, that elevates Jason Arday to this position of prestige. And I don't care how you want me to talk about it, but we have to be able to talk about it. And surely people on the left who disagree with me about many other things, surely rigorous, serious academics on the left of whom I know there are many, can see that this is a scandal, can see that this is shameful, and do not feel good about what is going on at Cambridge, at Harvard, at these other institutions where these statements are being made outright and then followed through on to the ruin of the reputation of these tremendous and well-heeled and storied places of higher education. Surely there are people on the left that find this grotesque. And I would just say, if we have any listeners who are of that variety, who are in that camp, you must let go of this. You cannot persist in clinging to this doomed way of doing things. It's manifestly self-destructive, and it will continue to produce scandal, and it will continue to bleed away the trust and the reputation of these once great institutions. And it should, and it is right that people should look at this and see people saying that they intend to make poor decisions, people saying that they intend to foreground race in their decisions, people saying that they intend to abandon the pursuit of truth in support of a ludicrous racial scheme, people doing that when they said that they were going to do it, and the results being predictably disastrous. I just think, at what point do you have to stop and say, okay, the people who have been talking about this are nasty conservatives. We don't like them. They're not our social set. We find them kind of low class. We think of them as chuds. You can have all of that. Tell us whatever you want to call us. But at some point, you cannot persist in this self-destructive philosophy just to spite the chuds. Like, when are you going to stop? I just find it remarkable that people are so devoted to their own sense of superiority and rightness that they will basically just dismantle their home institutions from within. And I think there's only one way out of this. You're going to have to lance this boil. You're going to have to get DEI out of the schools. And I'm sorry to say it in such a blunt and unsophisticated way, but however you want to talk about it, stop doing this. You're ruining it for all of us. There's an excerpt in Clarence Thomas's autobiography, My Grandfather's Son, where he talks about the negative effects of affirmative action. And it's not only just obviously on society, on the people who now don't come into those positions, but it's not about the people who are actually elevated to those positions themselves with the skills and talents that they don't have. You look at Heather McDonald's done work on this, where you look at lawyers, you look at what big law firms are doing, and you're seeing the declining quality of their work as they elevate people who shouldn't be there. And then they, of course, in most respects, can't really learn the work, cannot do it well. Their lives then in the long term have actually been made much worse. Okay, in the short term, you know, they got a good bump from salary, whatever. But then it not only then affects them, it affects whole races and just in generalizations and how people view certain things. People go to a doctor, say, and see his race and have immediate feelings about whether they think he's competent or not. And so this just only goes to make that more and more apparent. And I think that is just such a crime, such a thing that you just wish people could go to jail for this kind of thing. But you're right, at the end of the day, it's really up to these institutions themselves. I mean, conservatives in large respect are kind of still the outliers. Certainly, you look at all these reports of one conservative professor for 40 in this department, or no conservative professors in this department. So this is really up to liberals of reason, and certainly they're still out there, but they need to be the ones at the tip of the spear. They need to be the ones that act. They need to be the ones to really, like you said, boil this lance and really talk about this, shine a light on it. There needs to be non-profits and institutions and people talking about this daily, because it's starting to really come all crashing down. I mean, conservatives, obviously we can see it. We said this was going to happen, and this is exactly what is happening. But now it's really up to the left, to the people who still run many of these institutions to really do something, because if they don't, not only are you going to have no conservatives going to Harvard, you're going to have Harvard, Yale, Oxford, all these institutions in the general public just being thought as an absolute joke. All their prestige, tradition, history is going to be gone, and they're just going to be thought of as basically a bunch of clowns filling these institutions. That's such a shame, especially for people who, what if their life's dream was to go to Harvard or to go to Yale and get a great education, and instead they just are indoctrinated into woke doctrines. So the whole thing is just, it's a shame, but no, like you said, I would second again. I mean, if you really want to change and don't keep going down the same path that is going to lead to destruction, I mean, it's really up to some of these liberals and these institutions to do something. Well said. And I do think this is an intra-left problem, which I think conservatives and liberals are obviously not on great terms at this time in the history of America or the West, and certainly not in the UK. But I just, for what it's worth, I think there are a lot of serious right-wingers who would welcome a real effort at, a real reckoning from within the left and would make efforts to support that and to acknowledge and honor it where it appeared. I mean, I have in the past called out people on the left who have done good work in this domain and who dissent from the orthodoxy in a good way. And I just think this is a place where the right can't really solve this problem for the left. We can create alternative institutions, and we are, and we can try to sort of critique from the outside, but this is a problem taking place within institutions that have been almost thoroughly captured by left-wingers. And it's going to have to be resolved, if it is resolved, from within those institutions and from within the left, or else I think those institutions will just be, will continue to lose all of their trust and prestige. All right, this was a blast, but this really fascinating article by Time and Climb, sometime contributor to The American Mind. This piece is in First Things, and you can find it, I believe it's in front of their paywall. I'm not logged in, though I am, of course, a First Things subscriber, but you can get it even if you're not at firstthings.com. It's called A Catholic Moment or an American Century. And Klein's argument in this piece is that it's very much the latter, if it's anything, that America has been accused, described as going through a Catholic moment recently, but Klein marshals a number of figures and arguments to the effect that no, that's not the case. Although Catholics remain a significant minority, although they exert a major intellectual influence, obviously in our public culture, America is not, will not be, has never been a Catholic nation in any definitive way. So just to run through, this is a short-ish piece, so you can go read the whole thing, and I recommend you do, but I'm going to extract some of the arguments here so that we can discuss them. He, Klein writes, to cite one example, the percentage of Americans who convert from Catholicism to Protestantism, Protestantism, 4%, is higher than the percentage of all converts to Catholicism, 1.5%. Then he spends some time with, of course, J.D. Vance, the vice president, who is really the prime figure in this so-called Catholic moment, and points out that Vance, although he certainly is Catholic and does speak of Catholic theology in public, always has to modulate his Catholicism through what he understands and knows to be the evangelical Protestant non-denominational or general denominational sensibilities of his audience, that is, the American people. His book has a classic kind of Appalachian-looking Protestant steepled church on the cover, even as it discusses his conversion to Catholicism. And Vance himself even takes a stance relative to the pope that you might describe as distinctively Americanist, if not Protestant. In other words, he wants to keep the pope in his sacred sphere and let secular leaders rule over their sphere. Then Klein also points out that a lot of the stuff that gets pegged as Catholic, like the Ordo Amoris or just war theory, also belongs to the Protestant tradition, broadly understood, and certainly would be claimed by many of the reformers that have had the biggest influence on America. John Calvin would never say that Augustus, or Augustine rather, was a Catholic thinker. In fact, just to the contrary, the claim of many of the reformers is that they were excavating from under mounds of Catholic detritus the true Christian tradition, which was still pure in some of the great theologians before the Protestant Reformation, including Augustine. So that would be a way of saying that even if ideas like the Ordo Amoris are major central points of American discussion at this time, that the Catholics are taking over the public discourse. Finally, he concludes with this line, and I think this is where we should begin, or rather where I should hand it over to you, Mike. Insofar as America ceases to be Protestant, spiritually and culturally, it ceases to be America. The future is not Catholic. It's either Protestant or atheist. Obviously, I want to hear your thoughts about this piece in general, Mike. But first of all, agree or disagree, insofar as America ceases to be Protestant, spiritually and culturally, it ceases to be America. Yeah, no. And actually, I do want to preface this conversation. So I've been friends with Tymon. I know him. I also worked with him when he was editor-in-chief of American Reformer, which is a Protestant online journal. It's a bit part-time on the side. So anyway, so we are friends, just to get that out. Yeah, full disclosure. No one likes this guy. Sure. But I mean, that idea, I think, I mean, you look at Protestantism around the founding, this is a number that's really out there right now, too. I mean, it's like 98%, I think, of America was Protestant. There were some surveys done in the 20th century that suggested that Americans of that era really were not churchgoers. But actually, there's been some revisionist scholarship lately that's shown that that's actually untrue. That number, I think, has increased markedly. I think it was like 30% or 40%, supposedly, but it was actually way more than that who were regular churchgoers. You just go back to John Jay in Federalist II talking about professing the same religion, and you think, okay, maybe it was overstated. It really wasn't. When you start looking at the denominational squabbles and who came over from where, from what countries, who was represented, I mean, really, it was congregationalism totally, basically dominated, especially Massachusetts, later kind of changed over to Unitarianism for a lot of interesting reasons, which was kind of Jefferson's dream, actually, that the United States totally would become Unitarian. That didn't quite happen, but certainly, in the Northeast, that started happening. But really, the fight really was, at that time, it was between different denominations. George III famously said of the American Revolution, when he first started hearing about the colonists rebelling, that, oh, this is Presbyterian. This is a Presbyterian rebellion, which is an interesting comment on that, on what was behind that. You're right to say that just war theory, you look at political theology about the civil kingdom and the ecclesial kingdom and what those two things are. Not necessarily today's separation church and state, but those ideas that the two swords, essentially, that each, the magistrate and the pastor, the priest, I mean, both have duties given directly by God under the kingdom of God. So those two things are woven throughout Protestantism, starting with Martin Luther, I mean, going to Calvin, going to Henry Bollinger, Theodore Beza, who took over for Calvin. I mean, just all over the place. Natural law thinking, obviously, is a huge part of, I would say, magisterial Protestantism that I think, unfortunately, people think more of what happened in the 20th century, guys like Karl Barth, who really attacked that. But that's not really magisterial Protestantism, circa 16th century, 17th century. So I do think in that respect, in that historical respect, I mean, clearly, the United States was founded, as I arguably, I think, understood in the right way, a Christian nation, just as Great Britain, France, I mean, all the nations of that time would have thought of themselves as that way. And I think the Protestant ethos, the Protestant spirit is clearly woven just throughout, it's shot through, basically, are the fabric of America. I think that's absolutely true. You could argue that, and he does bring up the interesting point about even the public Catholicism that's on display. You know, sometimes the United States, I'd say, more in the political sphere, say somebody like J.D. Vance, say, and he brings up this, the Charlie Kirk Memorial, where you saw even Roman Catholics there, basically talk in ways, you know, they didn't talk about purgatory. They didn't mention some Catholic doctrines. They talked about specific Catholic doctrine. They talked about it in ways that I think evangelicals would have no problem with whatsoever. It was aesthetically also extremely Protestant, that whole event. Very much so. I mean, just like a, you know, non-denom kind of mega, you know, box church, it was exactly what you would find in there. Me having spent, you know, a little bit of time in some of those churches. But yeah, I think that there's a lot of power about, you know, what things, you know, what things appear to be the ideas of Protestantism, the aesthetic, certainly, I think of modern, you know, modern evangelicalism and Protestantism. That's actually a whole separate question. The connection between those two, actually, is an interesting one. You know, how many evangelicals are actually Protestants? But I would say, I mean, there's a lot of explanatory power here. You know, I would say just to maybe be a devil's advocate a bit, you could say that this kind of more Protestantized form of public Catholicism, especially that you see in politics, you know, and Protestants, I think, are about, you know, 40-45%, I think, of America now. And that's certainly been on the decline too lately. But if that kind of Catholicism, you know, can come up, I don't see how that that couldn't rule in America as it is now. But it's, again, it still would be a Catholicism in a much more, you know, kind of Protestant spirit. But again, I think I do agree with the large thrust of that idea. Protestantism was certainly, you know, integral to the American founding. And it is now, even if, you know, there's kind of a Catholic, a long-term Catholic resurgence that does take over, and it's a more Protestantized, I guess, kind of form because it is American. But yes, I think that, you know, Protestantism is a key factor in America. It's in our DNA, and I think it always will be in some shape, way or form. Yeah. When I saw this closing line of this piece, I kind of perked up because I had a very martini laden conversation with my friend Michael Knowles, who obviously isn't a Catholic, and you would say I think one of America's prominent Catholic intellectuals now. And I was making the somewhat cheeky case, but I'm pretty serious about this, that all the most obvious answers to America's current problems are Catholic answers. But America is such a fundamentally Protestant country that if we ever adopt the Catholic solutions to our problems, we will cease to be America. In other words, we will buy those Catholic solutions at the expense of our national identity. So the reason why Catholicism is potent right now, and I think it is potent, I think it's attractive to people, and it's got a lot of rhetorical and intellectual force, is because we can see the appeal so clearly of getting out from the essential tensions and paradoxes that our uniquely Protestant character as a nation creates for us. And I think those tensions and paradoxes are the ones that Protestantism itself sets for itself, even a very robust, intellectually rigorous Protestantism. And that's no knock against Protestantism or America, by the way. All serious intellectual, spiritual frameworks contain tensions, dualities that have to be navigated through prudence because that's part of our humanity. We don't actually ever attain a perfect system. And there are possibilities that Protestantism opens up in history, which I believe are good, necessary, and beautiful, and that it was the time for them to come onto the stage when the Protestant Reformation happened. There are also new paradoxes and questions that Protestantism introduces into the human condition because it represents a genuine revolution in human sensibility and thought. So I think, Mike, you very ably outlined all the ways in which historically this is the case for America. In other words, our people have been historically Protestant. The roots of many of our constitutional ideas are, as the king observed, Presbyterian in essence. They have obvious formal structural similarities to the Presbyterian church structure. And whenever people ask me, as they sometimes do, what the heck even is Presbyterianism, I basically say it's like if you did the American Constitution but in a church. The similarities are that clear, I think, that you can draw those lines. I also think that there is a philosophical or even, if you like, ontological way in which America is Protestant. In other words, if you try to outline and put your finger on the essential aspects of our system of government and our national character, you'll find that they line up with essential Protestant points of view that can't be meaningfully altered. It's not like the ship of Theseus. You can't take one of those pieces away and replace it with others and keep the same country. These are load-bearing pillars. And I would refer here to our representative structure of government as one aspect of that, which I've just mentioned, the kind of Presbyterian way that we elect our leaders and representatives and the way we expect our public and the public's will to inform what happens in the country writ large. And I would combine that then also, and this is a really nerdy version of this point, but I do think it's important. I wonder if Tymon would agree with me about this or not. I think that at a fundamental level, when you get down to asking, what is Protestantism as compared with Catholicism? Yes, there's the whole transubstantiation thing. Yes, there's Marian theology. Yes, there's all the stuff that we typically associate with Martin Luther and Calvin, whatever. But even deeper than that, at a really subterranean level, Protestantism represents an epistemological revolution that comes alongside the scientific revolution. Even though they're often pitted against one another, they're both responses to the collapse of the top-down epistemology represented by the Catholic magisterium and an attempt to ground human knowledge. And in the case of Protestantism, knowledge of the highest things in a more bottom-up kind of epistemology that can be rooted in the individual believer and his relationship to scripture and his relationship directly to God is mediated by the Holy Spirit. It doesn't mean the church isn't important. It doesn't mean communal ways of knowing don't exist in Protestantism. It just means that your direction of travel has reversed in Protestantism from Catholicism. And I think if you port that way of looking at things into the political, human, temporal, secular sphere, you get the American spirit at every level. You get this American idea that it's the common man who knows best, right? That it's the wisdom of crowds, that we together are going to solve our problems at the most local possible level. And then we're going to build up into the state level and into the federal government and all of that, rather than this top-down imposition of a kind of centralized authority that gets dictates from God and has privileged knowledge. We're very, I think, in America, skeptical of and wary about the idea of privileged knowledge. I think you've seen that, again, most recently in the COVID rehashing that we've had, this idea that some expert gets to whisper in the ear of God, and then God whispers in his ear, and then he just dictates to us from on high, right? Our revulsion at that is also a holdover from our fundamentally Protestant attitude. Now, the reason I say that this creates all sorts of paradoxes and difficulties is many of our current disasters are corruptions of that spirit, right? Our licentiousness in the realm of sex and just social life, right? The way that our social structures have been completely dissolved, and people just do whatever they want, and they're suffering from this kind of rootlessness and misdirection, right? That's an excess or a contortion of this idea that the common man knows best, that the individual gets to decide. Obviously, again, Protestantism, rightly understood, has the resources, I think, to temper this and to alter it. But Catholicism has a really, really easy answer, or a comparatively easy answer, which is integralism, right? That's the other thing that's not mentioned in this piece and that hasn't really been central to this whole discussion. But the reason that that was so appealing for a while is because the problem it solves is very acute right now, the problem of disarray, which Protestantism introduces or makes possible. The reason integralism hasn't worked or caught on is because it's precisely a non-American, that is to say, fundamentally Catholic answer to the problem of disarray introduced by the American Protestant attitude toward these sorts of questions. Now, that doesn't mean Catholicism doesn't have something rich to contribute. I think Tymon is right, actually, to mention Catholicism alongside Judaism in this piece, because those are two, I think, special minorities in this country. They're not just any other group. They're not like Asian-Americans or Hindus or whatever, all people that I'm happy to have milling about in America, but not special in the way that Jews and Catholics both are as sort of minority report Abrahamic believers. I would say the Jews contribute a major substrain of American character just as Catholics do. And as I've said, their importance has grown in recent years for obvious reasons. We're very glad right now to have all these Catholics around doing a heck in Catholic. I think that is... None of what I've said necessarily destroys or negates the importance of that. But I also think, and this is something that I know Catholics who would agree with me about this, I think that insofar as America accommodates itself to Catholicism, it ceases to be America. Insofar as Catholicism accommodates itself to Americanism, it ceases to be Catholic. And that's perhaps the most painful part of this, which Klein gestures at in his treatment of J.D. Vance, that Vance is a prominent Catholic, but he becomes prominent to just the degree that he modulates his Catholicism into a Protestant register. And I think that accounts for a lot of the sort of stranger in a strange land discomfort that some really rigorous patriotic American Catholics feel. I'm of the opinion that tensions like that, complexities like that are perfectly capable of existing within a single soul. I'm not making a dual loyalty claim about Catholics or Jews or whatever. I'm just saying that all of us are holding a number of other identities up against our American identity. Some of them integrate well, some of them don't. I think Catholicism and Americanism exist in productive tension, but that if they ever collapse into identity, then one or the other has been compromised in some radical way. There's not really a question there, Mike, but I'm interested in your response. Yeah, and you see Catholics throughout the 20th century, John Courtney Murray and others, looking back to Orestes Brownson, kind of talking about in the 1800s, his work on America, Catholicism, Tocqueville, he talked about it. I think he actually predicted that America would essentially turn Catholic, which was an interesting prediction at that time, especially just because there are certainly many more Catholics now who are much more influential now. I would say, especially on the right, in the conservative political world, too, Aaron Wren has written about this, too. Josh Mitchell, I think, has, too, where you look at the conservative movement, you look at, say, William F. Buckley, National Review, you look at the genesis of it in the mid-20th century, Brett Moselle, and it owes a lot to Catholic thought. And then you see with the WASPs, the mainlines, the Protestant mainlines, and their influence diminishing, and you see one of the problems of today, which is an evangelical block that votes for Republican presidents, voted for, I think, 81% white evangelicals, voted for Donald Trump, I think it was both in 2020 and 2024. It was 80%, I think, in 2016. So you have the numbers politically are there, certainly, but their actual influence is diminished to, I think, a fairly big degree. You're right, their intention, but I think, look, we're human beings, we're used to holding things in tension like that. I think it's about keeping the prudential middle, essentially, and not going on one side extreme or the other. Although Tymon did talk about in his piece, he didn't use integralism in that term, but he talked about the pull of, say, ultramontanism, and that kind of pope, not only as the ecclesial ruler, but the civil ruler as well. And so I think that's why you have a little bit more radical strains that are trying to go back to pre-Vatican II. You just had the SSPX, I think, then that segment basically be excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church, which is interesting because they had, I think, consecrated four bishops illegally, and so the pope finally made that move. And there was obviously a lot of tension in between them and the Roman Catholic Church for a long time. You obviously see this in Germany with some of the bishops and what they're doing there. So with an institution that big, those things are going to happen about gatekeeping, about who is administering the sacraments rightly in their eyes and who is not. But yeah, I think all this goes back to a question of the future, which is, do we need a religious revival to bring back, or do we just need a political revival? What is going to take for us to, I think, reassert kind of the pillars on which obviously this country stands? Because it's not only the political principles, certainly, but it's also that kind of... Tom West talks about this, I think, in his book, The Political Theory of the American Founding, which if you have not read it, please do. It's absolutely fantastic and probably the best thing written on the subject. But he talks about this analogy of the horse and the rider, where the natural rights principles were the rider, but it was situated sitting on a horse. Obviously, Protestantism specifically was part of that matter that was there that actually made Republican government actually possible in the first place. It's not surprising that this is being brought up right now when we're talking about how do we revive Republican government? How do we return to the principles of the American founding? Because Protestantism is so intertwined with that. We're looking at this obviously from a political angle above all, I think, because of the salience of Protestantism and because of the importance that it's had in this country. I think that's what politically the question ultimately points toward is, how do we revive the country? Do we need a revival in religion? Do we need a third grade awakening, fourth grade awakening? Do we need a George Whitfield for this age? Can it be, say, a Catholic bishop? Can it be a guy like Robert Barron? Can that happen? That's why I think politically these things are being brought up right now because they really point to the future of America in our 250th year. Is there going to be a 500th year? How do we do that? How do we rebuild the pillars to get to that point? I can actually answer this question. Yes, we do need a religious revival. It's not often that I get to be so definitive about something, but I do think that's clearly true. It's true in ways which don't show up on a political science survey or whatever, but the conversation that we've been having, I think, makes clear why that might be so. Now, you may disagree, Mike, I don't know, and we don't have to belabor it too much in this already long segment, but I suspect that there is a revival coming, and I suspect that the only thing guaranteed about it is it's a revival of religiousness, of religious belief, belief in the supernatural, belief in higher powers, belief in ultimate things, and indeed, passionate conviction in those beliefs. I think wokeness and its attendant tremors were actually precursors to that in that they weren't theologies, they were compared to theologies, they weren't theologies, but they had a lot of the shape and character of theologies, as was discussed at the time, and many of the fanatical political movements, even of the 20th century, but certainly the 21st, have had this quasi-religious character. I think these are pre-tremors, beginnings of a return of religious sentiment to the world, because it has to, and I should say a return to the West, because it exists in the world in great quantities, but I think in the West, people are going to start believing in stuff. You're already seeing it. Now, what I don't think is guaranteed is that that will correspond to a kind of religiosity that we might like or like to see. I think it could, and the fact of America's Protestant shape makes it more likely that that belief will get funneled in a kind of churchy, Christian, religious-flavored direction, but I don't think that's a guarantee at all, and I definitely don't think it's a guarantee that you're going to get good, orthodox Protestantism or even Catholicism out of this revival. This is a place where I think there is a major role for public intellectuals and for church leaders and local theologians and pastors, because if you've got just in the air a revival of religious sentiment, everything depends on whether the person who's experiencing that reaches out and finds a crystal therapist or reaches out and finds somebody with a persuasive theology that also answers the passions that are moving in the air, and I think you really need both. Sometimes we've got a lot of intellectual horsepower on the side of religion but not a lot of connection to people's daily experience of the numinous as it actually occurs, and then sometimes we've got a lot of connection to the numinous, a lot of wooey and gooey kind of religious feeling and not a lot of clarity about what that means or what we should do about it. So I think really the question we face is, are we going to be able to marry the coming wave of religious sentiment to a rigorous theology and intellectual tradition that reads as authentically American? Can we make the introduction between your newly questioning pod bro who just realized that there's something more than drugs in the world and something's out there man, is that guy going to find a Christianity that is American authentically and speaks to him in a way that he can get behind and start preaching to others? That's I think kind of where I'm at with all of this. Yeah, I think that's a very important insight because I'm a big fan of the reformers, Protestant magisterial tradition and that kind of thing. Is that going to be the thing coming back? No, that is not what the stats show at all. I think the biggest reformed denomination in America is Presbyterian Church of America, and they're about 400,000 members. I mean, that's it. They're growing, but it is tiny, tiny, tiny. I think the SBC, the Southern Baptist Convention, total membership there is an interesting number to try to calculate, but it's anywhere between 13 and 14 million, although they've obviously been falling recently too. But Dale Coulter, who actually runs a newsletter actually at First Things as well, it's called The Protestant Mind. He talked about, and this is from just his past newsletter on seminaries and the fall of mainline seminaries, the future of Protestantism in the US is nonconformist. This does not mean that older magisterial forms will go away, but they won't have the numbers to sustain most seminaries in a well-known faculty or school of thought. Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian slash Anglican seminaries will need to look to nonconformist forms to survive. So I think you then extract that, extrapolate that, and take that to a larger sense, which is it is going to be about, I think, non-denominational evangelicalism, whether we like that or not. That is going to be the form. I mean, we've already seen that clearly, again, at the Kirk Memorial. That is exactly what was expressed. So I think in order to really make America great again, I think, in a sense, we have to make evangelicalism great again too, in a way. I think connect it to its history, connect it to the broader tradition. But I think that if Protestantism is the future of America, and I think it still is, that is going to be the vehicle. Fascinating. Well, this predictably, we both had a lot to say about this, and I really enjoyed this conversation. So thank you, Mike. It's always fun. Not that we don't love having Ryan around, but when the cat's away, as they say, it's fun to really dig into something, just the two of us. We were going to talk about the common good, which is back in the news, back in the discourse, capital D. But we don't have time because we've gotten engrossed with both of those topics. And so we're going to shove that over to our extra paid episode at claremontinstitute.substack.com. That's where you can become a paid subscriber to Claremont Digital Plus. And I'm going to basically just quiz Mike and have him debrief me and bring me up to speed on this whole, the latest in common good gate that has been roiling Twitter. So we're going to talk about all of that, and you won't want to miss that, plus all the extra goodies that you get when you become a Claremont Digital Plus subscriber. One more time, it's claremontinstitute.substack.com to sign up, and we would be most glad to have you join us. That's it, though, for the main episode. So thank you very much for listening. If you want to know more about all the work we do, you can visit, of course, our website at americanmind.org. You can also check out the Claremont Review of Books at claremontreviewofbooks.com, where there are all sorts of new things getting released every week, including articles that are coming out from behind the paywall. I do some reading aloud of pieces that you can listen to on the feed. You can check out The Close Read, which is our sister podcast where I interview various authors from CRB. And all of that and more can be found at claremontreviewofbooks.com. Take a look at our DC-based Center for the American Way of Life at dc.claremont.org. If you want to donate and support us over and above the cost of a Digital Plus subscription, we'd be most grateful. You can go to claremont.org slash donate and let us know in the comments that you came via the American Mind podcast. Thanks, as always, to our one-man production and engineering crew, the Brother G, Ryan Gannon, and thanks to you for listening. We will talk to you next week.