We discuss the ideas of Hayek, Meyer, Kirk, Reagan, the dissident right, and why rebuilding a resilient society may require recovering the moral and intellectual foundations that once sustained it.

Order or pre-order Stephanie's new book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, here.

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

BEN KLUTSEY: Today on the podcast we have Stephanie Slade. She is a senior editor at Reason, where she covers the American conservative movement, and a fellow in liberal studies at the Acton Institute. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, among other outlets. She was a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow in 2016 and a Bastiat Prize finalist in 2013.

She is the author of Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, which will be published by the University of Notre Dame Press. Congratulations, Stephanie.

STEPHANIE SLADE: Thank you, Ben.

KLUTSEY: And thanks for being here to have this conversation.

SLADE: Really happy to be here.

Fusionist constitutionalism

KLUTSEY: To kick things off, let’s start with definitions. And I like the term that Meyer uses once or twice—I think you mentioned this in the book—fusionist constitutionalism. First of all, what is it and what problem is it trying to solve?

SLADE: Fusionism is the idea that both liberty and virtue are necessary for human flourishing. I’ve been working really hard to try to figure out how to boil it down to the simplest terms, and that’s what I’ve come up with. Liberty and virtue are both necessary. We need to care about both of them.

Now, it is basically a sort of political or philosophical synthesis that says we should bring together the classically liberal political tradition with all of its concerns about individual liberty, individual rights, limited government, rule of law, separation of powers, free markets, and all that stuff that goes into the classical liberal political tradition. But it needs to be married to something more than that. And so, fusionism, as it emerged in the conservative movement in America in the 20th century, marries classical liberalism to the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.

And so, the constitutionalism comes in because that’s part of the classical liberalism. This is how we in this country—the institution that we created, that we established to help accomplish that separation of powers and individual rights, individual freedom. But again, it’s not purely liberalism. It’s liberalism married to this thicker, moral tradition that comes down to us through the Judeo-Christian tradition and basically helps us answer some questions about right and wrong, good and evil, where did we come from, what we were made for, and how do we find meaning in life.

Parallels between Hayek, Kirk, and Meyer

KLUTSEY: Now, you draw parallels between Hayek, who is one of my favorites, and Kirk or Meyer. Both of them, I think, share the ways in which you draw these parallels. I’m wondering whether the parallels are mainly temperamental or are they more substantive?

SLADE: I don’t think it’s mostly temperamental. I actually think these three men you just mentioned, who are three of the main characters in the story I’m telling in the 20th century right-of-center politics in America that emerges, were quite different temperamentally.

Frank Meyer was a sort of fiery, argumentative guy who always wanted to fight you about why fusionism was right. Russell Kirk was a sort of Midwestern gentleman. He was a Burkean conservative, like a traditionalist Burkean conservative, which is not to say that he didn’t have strong opinions about things. In fact, Meyer and Kirk often, especially earlier in their careers, butted heads a little bit and wrote dueling negative reviews of each other’s books. But they eventually came around to realizing that they were much closer together on substantive issues and their commitment to individual freedom and virtue than they had originally, I think, thought.

They developed over time a positive, constructive working relationship. Frank Meyer was the books editor of National Review magazine. Russell Kirk wrote dozens and dozens of books over the course of his life. So, Meyer would commission reviews of Kirk’s books to run in National Review. And he also commissioned Kirk to write reviews of other people’s books and brought him in as a contributor to a collection of essays that he published on What is Conservatism? And he wanted to make sure that Russell Kirk’s voice would be in that, because he realized he represented a really important strain of thinking on the right in America. And both of them were similar to and influenced by Friedrich Hayek, who was a little bit older, who came before and was obviously, as many of us think, the patron saint of modern classical liberalism and libertarian movement.

And so, I argue in the book that one way of thinking about right-of-center politics is that you have these two poles. You have the traditionalist pole, somebody who’s more of a social conservative like Russell Kirk on one end. And you have the libertarian pole on the other end, somebody like Hayek, and that these two things are competing with each other or polling against each other.

But what actually happens, what I found when I studied the history, is that they’re much closer together. Hayek, Kirk, and Meyer all believe things that are deeply overlapping. They really had many of the same commitments.

Hayek actually cared a lot about traditionalism. He thought tradition was how we handed down wisdom through the generations, through a process of trial and error, and transmitting that wisdom to the next generation. Meanwhile, Russell Kirk, who’s not thought of as a libertarian, was extremely libertarian on a lot of things, I found, when I actually sat down and started reading him.

So I think that this is fusionism in action. Many people who are part of that movement in this era are committed to both liberty and virtue, even if they’re not necessarily remembered by most people today as such.

KLUTSEY: But Hayek wrote that famous essay, Why I Am Not a Conservative, in ways that seemed like he was trying to insist emphatically, “Yes, you may perceive me as traditionalist and so on, but I’m really not.” What’s the rationale behind that?

SLADE: Yes. And in fact, that essay was originally a speech that he gave at the Mont Pelerin Society against Russell Kirk. Kirk was there as his respondent. And so Kirk was there as a conservative and Hayek was saying, “I am not a conservative.”

However, if you actually read it, what you’ll find is he’s talking very much about European or a British style conservatism, which is something different than what he says in the essay conservatism looks like on our shores in the United States. In America, liberalism or whigism—he talks about being an “old Whig,” that’s how he really identifies—is the basis upon which our entire politics here, in his opinion, was founded, because of our founding commitments to separation of powers, rule of law, limited government, and individual rights.

And so even the conservatives here are basically liberals, in his view. He’s basically saying, “I’m not against those guys. I’m not against the classical liberal conservatives that you find in America. What I’m against is the sort of European, Old World conservatism that is blood and soil, throne and altar, and is committed to defending monarchy, aristocracy, and the idea that you’re born into a certain state in life and you’re expected to stay there and be happy with it, as opposed to this very American way of approaching social mobility, where you can make anything of your life if you’re hardworking, if you have good ideas, you can be born poor and become rich, or vice versa.” That’s a sort of whiggish approach that Hayek likes. And he recognizes that’s actually the thing that most American conservatives have at least claimed to be defending.

KLUTSEY: And he also talks about change, and even though he thinks change is good and institutions evolve over time, he had a bit of a Burkean sensibility about studying previous institutions before you try to destroy them or change them, right?

SLADE: Yes, very Chestertonian. Chesterton’s fence—not tearing down the fence until you understand why it was built in the first place—I think that’s very Hayekian also. I think that when you actually go beyond the superficial reputations that some of these men have, you find a lot more overlap than you might be expecting.

Fusionist dissenters within the right

KLUTSEY: Very interesting. Now, fusionism always had dissenters from within the right. And you named some of them: Bozell, Zoll, Kevin Phillips. What was their core objections, if you could boil them down?

SLADE: Well, it depends. There are different ways to object to fusionism.

If fusionism is liberty and virtue, and a dual commitment to both those things, you could be a radical libertarian or a secular libertarian who cares about liberty but rejects the virtue piece and says, “We ought to dispense with or leave that Judeo-Christian moral tradition in the past, because it has no relevance to us today.” And so there always have been some dissenters from fusionism on the libertarian side in that way.

You could also be a dissenter on the right who’s all about virtue, a sort of theocratic, authoritarian conservatism that says, “I want virtue and I want it at the point of a gun. And I think that liberty and libertarianism is standing in the way of us having a good, morally virtuous society.” And in fact, we have seen a resurgence of this way of thinking about the relationship between liberty and virtue in our politics in recent years. There’s some people who say, “I care about the common good, I care about virtue. And I think libertarianism, free markets, limited government, or the rule of law is actually standing in the way of that.”

And then there are some of the people that I talk about in the book, and many people in our politics these days, the neo-reactionary faction today, who basically say, “All of this philosophizing about liberty and virtue is all beside the point because this stuff is all for suckers. Really, politics is war. Politics is entirely about friends, enemies, and acquiring power, coercive power, violent power, by whatever means necessary in order to reward our friends and punish our enemies.”

And this very cynical approach to politics says, “We’re not here to try to build a system where we can live peacefully with those who don’t share our values. We want to defeat and destroy the people who don’t share our values or force them to adopt our values and our way of life.”

Fusionism and foreign policy

KLUTSEY: And over time, fusionism becomes associated with foreign policy hawkishness, as well. How does that happen?

SLADE: I think it’s understandable. The people who were the main fusionists, so this is mostly people like Frank Meyer, who were in the National Review magazine orbit during this era, they really were all super Cold War hawks. They really believed that the Soviet Union posed an existential threat to the American way of life and to the liberal elements.

They wouldn’t have used the word liberal because back then, the word liberal was only in these spaces as it is often today for many people, as associated with left-of-center politics or the Democratic Party. So, they wouldn’t have said, “We’re in this to defend liberalism.” Hayek understood that because he was European. He understood this is true liberalism.

But basically, these conservative, fusionist, but hawkish, conservatives in the 20th century saw the Soviet Union as a threat to the free world and to the liberalism of our way of life, to the liberal, democratic capitalist order. They saw it correctly, as militantly atheist, militantly anti-capitalist, and militantly bent on domination of the world, a coercive domination of the world.

And so they said, “We have to have a strong response to this. We have to be treating this as the existential threat that we think it is. And that means a strong military that cares a lot about whether or not the Soviet Union is able to expand its sphere of influence.” And so they believed this. And they argued for it in National Review, Buckley argue for it on his TV show, and so on and so forth.

What I argue in my book, though, is that this is not a core component of fusionism as the philosophical synthesis that I’m defending, which is again this classical liberalism married to the Judeo-Christian moral tradition. You can be a fusionist who cares about liberty and virtue and be a pacifist. You can be a fusionist who looks at the world and comes to different conclusions about the prudential question of whether, back then or now, we ought to have a more restraint-oriented or a more interventionist kind of approach to military, because that’s a policy question.

So we start with our principles, liberty and virtue, and then we apply them to the circumstances that we find ourselves in, and then we come to a conclusion, and we might disagree about the conclusion, about whether it’s a good idea for us to be involved in the world militarily or not.

I think there are plenty of people who, by my definition of fusionism, care about liberty and virtue, but who might say, “Look, us going out and getting involved in other people’s conflicts around the globe, it hasn’t produced the outcomes we thought it would. And we need to learn that lesson. And by the way, it also inevitably produces less freedom here at home. For example, having a draft is an obvious example, but also all the spending, all the money that we pour into a strong military, the lives that we sacrifice, all these things—these are not worth it. If you care about liberty and virtue, in fact, we should not be taking a more hawkish foreign policy approach.”

So, I think people can disagree and you can still be a good-faith fusionist and disagree about foreign policy and about many policies you can disagree. But specifically, I mean, especially this one, I think it’s a mistake to think that hawkish foreign policy or interventionist foreign policy is a core part of what it means to be a fusionist, even though, in practice, in the 20th century, in the Cold War context, most of them were.

Fusionists and free markets

KLUTSEY: On the liberty side of the conversation, how strongly did the fusionists hold on to free markets as the foundational principle that should drive our economy, outside of Meyer and Kirk and a few others? How strongly did fusionists hold that?

Because, obviously, when the rubber hits the road, and you actually have to make decisions and policy related to this, I know people are a little wishy-washy about that.

SLADE: That’s exactly how it plays out in practice. At a rhetorical level and at the level of ideas and intellectual debates, I think it was a really widespread, deep commitment to free markets.

And Frank Meyer, his position was that he was really quite a radical libertarian, although he was associated with National Review and was conservative. He thought that the government has three legitimate functions and three legitimate functions only, and that’s to protect our borders from external threats, to keep law and order on our streets, have a police system, and to have a court system so that we can adjudicate disputes like contract disputes between citizens. And so the courts, police, and military—that’s it. Get government out of everything else.

And especially—I think this was a really important insight that has gotten lost in many cases—he said that the same entity that has this monopoly over the use of violence, that in order to do those three functions that are legitimate and that you have to have a government, he thought, to carry out those functions, you don’t want to then empower that same entity with the power to decide how markets are going to run, how people are going to make a living, or how people are going to dispose of their property. Everything in the market sphere needs to be kept completely outside of that government sphere as much as humanly possible, because that would be way too much concentration of power to have the same entity that gets to police our streets and lock people in cages for breaking the law also be deciding how the economy is going to be run. So he was quite libertarian on that. And I think that was a very influential position.

But when you actually get into office, there’s a difference between intellectual debates, ideas, and rhetoric, when you actually have people who identify as fusionists or who are influenced by fusionist ideas coming into office, what you find is that it can be easier said than done.

And so, Ronald Reagan—very much fusionist in his rhetoric and in his commitments—he talks in speeches that he gives when he’s running for office and when he’s elected about the importance of liberty and virtue. He name-checks Frank Meyer and Friedrich Hayek. And he’s trying, right? He wants to reduce the size and scope of government. He believes in cutting taxes. He believes in cutting spending. But what ends up happening is he cut taxes, but he isn’t able to get the spending cuts pushed through. And so we end up with ballooning national debt.

And so, the point is that when you have the messiness of actual politics, it ends up being quite hard to actually do the things, even if you want to. Even if your intentions were good going in, you end up having to make compromises on the margins, and sooner or later you can really lose sight. The goal can get away from you, I think.

Institutions and the spread of fusionist ideas

KLUTSEY: Yes. Now, Frank Meyer helped spur a wave of institutions—Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Young Americans for Freedom, the Federalist Society, and the Philadelphia Society. How much credit do these institutions deserve for advancing fusionism versus simply reflecting it?

SLADE: That’s a great question. I opened my book with a description of the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, which is this institution founded by Hayek right after World War II. And he says when he’s founding this organization that it’s for scholars. It’s a lot of economists, but also historians and whatnot. And he says, “This is not going to be a public-facing organization. It’s going to be a forum and a gathering place for scholars who believe in the free society to come together and to discuss, to debate, and to get clear on our ideas without worrying about what’s politically possible right now.”

Because he said, “If we put good ideas out into the conversation and into the bloodstream, in the long run, that will change what’s politically possible a generation from now.” So, we shouldn’t be constrained by what we think is possible right now. We should be thinking long term and we should be thinking about putting good ideas out there.

That was how Hayek approached political change. And I think that Meyer, Buckley, and some of these guys in the United States who were the sort of founding fathers of the institutional conservative movement as we know it from the 20th century, they were really influenced by that. And Meyer really believed that, too.

We’ve got to get the first principles right. You can’t build a movement if you don’t have a good, sound philosophical grounding for that movement. Then, it’s not going to work. And so, engaging with ideas, debating ideas, getting clarity on ideas, really grappling with the challenges of the contradictions, or seeming contradictions, in our commitments, this is really important to him and transmitting those ideas to the next generation.

So, Intercollegiate Studies Institute is a student group, Young Americans for Freedom is an organization for young people, helping young people be steeped in these ideas and to have the habit of engaging in thinking, reading, and debating ideas—he thinks is super, super important. And that has to come first before you actually move into the electoral politics arena where you’re trying to get people elected and get policies implemented. That’s the order of operations that they all believe in.

So, these organizations are doing that. And they’re pretty successful for a while. My argument is that over time, actually, the focus on ideas peters out and a focus on purely getting our guys in office, acquiring power, seizing power, and using it against our enemies comes to supplant this focus on ideas. And that’s part of what’s gone wrong on the American right in our right-of-center politics in recent years.

Fusionism on the left

KLUTSEY: Super, super interesting. Now, was there such a thing as a fusionist left or left fusionist?

SLADE: If by fusionism you mean bringing different strains of thinking together, or if it’s the way many people use it today as another word for a coalition—you have two different factions and you’re bringing them together and trying to get them to play nicely and vote for the same person—then of course that coalition building is part of our politics always on left and right.

But the particular philosophical synthesis that came to be known as fusionism was specifically about liberty and virtue. It was about classical liberalism and the Judeo-Christian tradition. And this has been a right-of-center phenomenon in our country, in our actual history.

So there probably are other syntheses going on the left, and there certainly are coalitions being put together on the left. But I think the thing that I’m trying to resurrect with my work and with this book is the specific fusion of liberty and virtue that I think is the key to a good society and a good life. And I think that has unfortunately started to disappear from our political conversation.

Fusionism and Reagan

KLUTSEY: Now, Reagan is in some ways an embodiment of fusionism. And I’ve wondered after reading your book, whether the ideas of fusionism in some ways start and end with him. It starts, yes, before him, but he reflects these ideas, and as you talk about in the book, he does quote Frank Meyer, Friedrich Hayek, and others in his Conservative Political Action Conference speech as the kind of person who carries this idea into fruition. But then, at the end of his presidency, it peters out, right?

And I think part of the issue you talk about is that people think that victory has been achieved and people rest on their laurels a little bit. But there’s also this tension between whether ideas live in institutions or they live in people who actually carry them. And I’ve been trying to parse this out as I’ve been reading your book. What are your thoughts on that?

SLADE: I do think that, taking what starts out as ideas being debated in journals and magazine articles and at conferences and translating that into actual politics, popular politics at the presidential, the highest possible level, national politics, it does seem like it required the right man at the right moment to carry that message.

It’s hard to imagine somebody who didn’t have the sort of charisma and ability to connect with the American people and that sort of empathetic ability. People liked him. They wanted to have a beer with him. They believed that he understood their problems and wanted to help them. That stuff is also necessary in order to take ideas that live at a high academic level and bring them down to where the American people are and translate them into terms that will speak to them where they are. So I do think there’s a sort of great man necessary sometimes for that. But he couldn’t have existed at all if not for the intellectual groundwork that had been laid beforehand, because he was so influenced by these thinkers and writers.

There’s a story that the conservative historian Lee Edwards used to tell before he died about how he was working as a journalist and he was with the Reagans during their time. I think it was when Reagan was still governor of California. So, Lee’s traveling around and covering Reagan. And at one point, the Reagans invite him into their home and sit him down in their library and say, “Would you like some tea?” And they go into the kitchen to get tea.

And Lee Edwards gets up and starts flipping through the books on the shelf in Reagan’s library and he starts picking them off. And he sees Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. He opens it up and he sees that it’s dog-eared and marked up. He sees Bastiat’s The Law. These books have been read and they’ve been really engaged with, according to Lee Edwards. Reagan was not this sort of dumb Hollywood empty suit that some people wanted to make him out to be. He really had read, thought, and been influenced by ideas and by thinkers who came before him.

So I think that’s the argument. You might need the man with the political talents in order to take the message to the people. But he’s got to get those ideas from somewhere. And just very rarely do you have somebody who can do both those things—invent a philosophy and take it to the people all in one person—and there’s usually an intellectual lineage there that person has drawn upon.

The decline of fusionism after Reagan

KLUTSEY: Yes. So back to the victory point, is it indeed the case that fusionists became complacent because Reagan won? And toward the end, the Berlin Wall comes down—it was actually in the beginning of the George H. W. Bush presidency. People are like, “Look, we’ve got this.” Francis Fukuyama writes this in The End of History, which you note as well in your book. Is that really the cause of, or the beginning of the decline of fusionism?

SLADE: It seems that way to me. There’s this 11-year period from 1980 to 1991 when you have Reagan winning two landslide elections, a second one even bigger than the first. You have the fall of the Berlin wall, and then you have the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

I think it was naturally and understandably a sense that their ideas were so obviously vindicated. “How could anybody possibly doubt us anymore? These fusionist ideas of a free society over an unfree system of government and unfree economy, which is American,” they would say, “and innately fusionist. Our founders were fusionists. They believed in liberty and virtue. That’s what they were trying to accomplish was the enduring union of those two things. And so, this American experiment is so obviously superior to the alternative. It’s been demonstrated. Our global enemy is now in ruins. It’s time for us to move from the phase of building the case for the thing we believe in and move from that into the phase of trying to implement those ideas, get them enacted, get good people elected, and get policies on the books and in the world that reflect the lessons that we’ve learned.”

I think that’s natural. I sort of raise this question in the book and I don’t try to answer it because I don’t know the answers. Could it have been otherwise? Could you possibly have a victory like that, feel so vindicated, and not then turn your attention away from the ideas or toward what feels like the natural next step?

A visual that helps me is that the ideas and the philosophy are the foundation and then you’re trying to construct a structure, a building on top of it. That’s the political mechanism of winning elections and getting policies enacted. And you think, “Okay, we did the hard work for decades of laying that political, philosophical foundation. So now it’s time to build.”

And that’s natural. That’s understandable. But what you don’t realize is that the foundation will erode out from under you if you don’t tend to it. If you’re not continually rebuilding that foundation, it will disappear over time. At least, in this analogy, in the intellectual sense.

If you’re not doing the work of passing your philosophical commitments, the arguments, and the reasoning behind them on to the next generation, you’re going to end up with what we have now, which is a whole generation of young conservatives who don’t actually know what conservatism means or once meant in the American context. They’ve only ever been politically aware during the Donald Trump era. This is conservatism to them, that is, economic protectionism, industrial policy, a sort of belief in an almost unlimited, strong central executive. This is the stuff that would have been anathema to conservatives 50 years ago.

And young people today don’t know the arguments for why their predecessors felt the way they did and felt so strongly about it, because they’ve never encountered those arguments. All they know is that, “We’re Republicans and we want to own the left.” That’s all they’ve been taught. And so, the foundations, that philosophical foundation, it disappeared while we weren’t looking, while we were focused on other things.

The fusionist remnant

KLUTSEY: Are there any fusionists left?

SLADE: Absolutely. Yes. I feel this very strongly.

A few years ago, I think the conventional wisdom was that fusionism is dead. Maybe it was morally bankrupt all along, or maybe it was suited to the 20th century and the Cold War era, but it has no relevance to our problems today. That was sort of the conventional wisdom. Fusionism’s dead. Forget about Reagan. Time for something new and more muscular. The word muscular government or muscular conservatism I was seeing everywhere. And I think there’s a whole faction, I call them the dissident right, who does believe this still.

But there is also still a fusionist or classically liberal right, and there are lots of people still on it. And I’ve learned that because as I’ve been writing about these debates and these changes over the last five or 10 years, I’ve increasingly had people from various free market think tanks and intellectual institutions, scholars, and readers of Reason magazine where I write, reaching out to me and saying, “This is crazy. This big government conservatism that we’re seeing, it doesn’t resonate with me at all. I’m troubled by this. I feel like I’m the only one left, though.”

And I started to realize a lot of people out there are feeling like they’re the only one left, the lone remnant…

KLUTSEY: Remnants, yes.

SLADE: …of this old-school fusionist conservatism or fusionism. And so, I started trying to connect some of these people to each other, especially from different institutions on the right that are still committed to free markets and limited government.

And there is now what I would call a sort of countermobilization of people who are old-school fusionist, classically liberal types, Reagan-style conservatives, and libertarians who understand the importance of virtue also, who are saying, “We’re not okay with this change. This movement has gone off in this other direction that we don’t recognize. We’re not going to roll right over and accept it. We are going to try to fight back. We’re going to try to fight for the soul of this country.” And so I think there is a countermobilization happening.

The freedom conservatism statement of principles a few years ago, I think, was an expression of this—a really obvious expression of this—saying, “We’re not all nationalist, protectionist, and populist conservatives. Some of us still believe in the principles that we once claimed to hold, and we haven’t just abandoned them because it’s politically expedient.”

The dissident right

KLUTSEY: Right. And you coined the term dissident right. What constitutes the dissident right? I mean, you talk about the populists, the right-wing progressives, the post-liberals or anti-liberals, the theocons, and the new reactionary movement. Is there one or a couple of animating principles or ideas that you would identify as constituting the dissident right?

SLADE: I should say I didn’t exactly coin it. I adopted it. There have been others who have used it. Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist podcaster and YouTuber, has called himself dissident right. So this is not a term I invented.

But I adopt it because I think it is a useful umbrella term for all the different sort of factions and voices that you’re talking about who are all united by essentially rejecting the fusionist consensus of the last century. So they’re dissenting from what was once a consensus, and they’re saying we reject this. I also chose it because I needed an umbrella term and I wanted something that didn’t seem like I was tilting the deck against the people I’m arguing against, but I do think they’re wrong, and I am arguing against them.

So they all reject the liberty-virtue fusion in some way, but I do think there are, as we alluded to earlier, two broad ways that you can reject it. One is you can say, “I care about virtue, and I think your liberty is getting in the way.” And so there are some who are more of what I call the theocons, or they call themselves often the post-liberals. This tends to be the Catholic integralists, Christian nationalists, and it’s the social conservatives who say, “I want a virtuous society, and I think that too much libertarianism stops people from being able to attain virtue. So if we have laws on the books that make it easy to get divorced, if we have laws in the books that allow stores to operate on Sundays, if we have laws in the books that don’t ban pornography or obscenity, then people are going to make choices that are unvirtuous. And so we need government to help them be virtuous. We need less liberalism—we need less liberty—in order for people to make good choices and live good lives.” That’s one way of dissenting from the fusionist sort of equation of liberty and virtue.

The other way says, “I reject both your liberty and your virtue. This is all irrelevant to me. I think that thinking about these things is for suckers. In fact, we need to be realistic about politics being just purely a question of who has power and gets to use it to impose their way on everyone else.” That, I think, is more summed up by the group I call the neo-reactionaries in the book. And so this is people like the blogger Curtis Yarvin. It’s also some other even crazier people, like a guy who blogs and podcasts under the name Bronze Age Pervert. I talk about him in the book. But they’re essentially authoritarians, they’re philosophical authoritarians, and they’re saying, “What matters is acquiring power and using it for our ends. And so all this liberty and virtue stuff is beside the point.”

KLUTSEY: Yes, authoritarian and monarchist as well.

SLADE: Yes, right. It shows itself in different ways. But Yarvin, he actually wrote once where he basically said, “Look, I call myself a monarchist. As far as I’m concerned, a dictator is just a form of a monarch.”

The humanities and the case for freedom

KLUTSEY: You quote Bradley Thompson’s 2016 Mont Pelerin Society speech where he talks about the need for more historians, more philosophers, literature scholars, and not just economists. Do you agree with that? I mean, is the case for freedom better carried by the humanities than by economics?

SLADE: I don’t want to say anything against economics. My undergraduate degree is in economics. I love economics. And I think that it’s very frustrating to see people downplay or dismiss the importance of material well-being to any sort of coherent picture of a good society and the common good. Obviously, widespread abundance, material abundance has to be a part of that. And economics helps us understand realistically how to achieve that.

But yes, I came around, through the course of researching and reporting this book, to the conclusion which I did not know I was going to arrive at. I was trying to understand why so many young people are being seduced by what seem like very dangerous and toxic ideas of the dissident right. It seems, disproportionately, these ideas seem to be appealing to especially young men on the right. Why? Why are they being seduced? What is so appealing to them?

One of the things I came to realize is that they feel like we are missing the point when we’re talking about how to tweak policy in order to squeeze another few percentage points of productivity out of the economy or something, this tax rate versus this marginal tax rate, or whatever. They’re like, “You guys are just completely missing the point. Because what matters to us is how do I, as a young person in this age”—where they’ve been raised with moral relativism, and also with a very hostile sense of antagonism coming from all the cultural institutions that have been captured by the left, that are hostile to people like them—“want somebody who will fight for us and defend our rights in society against a hostile left that seems to hate us and want to use every weapon at its disposal, including state power, against us? We want somebody who will fight for us.” That’s the most important thing to them.

And, too, “We want some guidance on what does a good life even mean? What does that even look like? How do we begin to build toward something that would give us meaning and fulfillment?” And I think we, in the liberty movement broadly construed, are really good at talking about policy and how policy will lead to abundance and material well-being. But we have tended to be less comfortable talking about what are our answers to those more deep, existential questions about, “Who am I? Where did I come from? What was I made for? How do I find meaning in this world?”

And yet, I argue, the fusionist tradition actually has answers to those questions because philosophy, theology, and literature are part of that Judeo-Christian moral tradition. That’s that other piece of it besides just pure classical liberalism. But we have tended not to draw on that part of our inheritance as much, or we seem to be less comfortable with it.

We’re like, “Well, it’s for you to figure out what a good life looks like for you. We’ll leave that to you. We’re just going to figure out how to get government out of the way so that you can flourish and prosper.” And that seemed for a while like the right order to go in. We’re going to get government out of the way, so people are free, so that they can use that freedom to answer questions about what a good life looks like.

But what these young people seem to be saying is, “Until we know what a good life looks like and how to pursue it, and until we believe that there is an actual path to getting there somehow, we don’t care about you getting government out of the way. We would rather have big government if that means we can have a good life.”

And so we really have to engage with them on those existential questions more than I think we have tended to be comfortable doing over the last few decades. And I think that can only be done with the help from the humanities.

KLUTSEY: Does this connect with Kirk’s point about a moral imagination?

SLADE: I think so. Yes. So, this idea—it’s the hardest thing to write about because what is the moral imagination? He’s basically saying that a lot of what we know is not stuff we know from either empirical observation, or reading it in a book even, but it’s just the sense we get of things that you can get through literature, that you can get through poetry. It’s the way that we have knowledge that comes through these subrational means.

And if you’re not engaging with art—he would say basically literature, poetry, or art of all kinds—then you’re not reaching people and teaching people in some of the ways that are actually most important and forming their moral imagination so that they understand what is good, what is true, what is beautiful, and how to conceive of those things so that they can try to pursue them in their lives. We haven’t always done a great job of that.

KLUTSEY: Yes. So, doubling down on this theme—in your book, you write about modernity’s preoccupation with utilitarian pursuits crowding out “the patient work of forming and expanding our mind so as to know where those practical pursuits are supposed to be taking us.” I think it highlights the point that you previously made. What does recovering it look like in practice? How do we recover this?

SLADE: I think part of it is just a correction. I think it’s happening. I think that what you guys are doing at Mercatus is part of this, right? You’re not just focusing on pure economic policy anymore. Not saying that’s not important, not saying that you’re not going to keep doing that stuff, but you’re engaging with the humanities, you’re engaging with these deeper questions. And I think more of the institutions within the liberty movement and the broad, political right of center, sort of one-time fusionist space, are not afraid to go there, to have those conversations, and to engage with those questions and to bring that into the conversation. That’s really important.

Because, again, I think we just got a little bit squeamish about not wanting to seem like we’re passing judgment on anyone. “Everybody is welcome.” Because that’s been the dominant mode, and what I think some people on the post-liberal right or on the dissident right might say that we should take seriously, is they would say that’s actually liberalism crowding into a space where it doesn’t belong. Liberalism says we’re not going to use coercive force to make you live a certain way according to our values.

But it’s a mistake if we allow liberalism to tell us that we’re not allowed to have opinions, that we’re not allowed to share those opinions, that we’re not allowed to try to persuade people to make different choices because we think those choices actually will conduce to their flourishing, and these other choices won’t. If we are so afraid to take a stand on anything, even when there’s no coercion involved, then we’ve really lost an important part of that—we’ve lost a whole half of that fusionist equation, which is not just about non-coercion. That’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient.

Fusionism and resilience

KLUTSEY: Yes. As we wrap up this conversation, I want to get your pulse on how optimistic you are. This podcast is about resilience. By resilience, I mean the ability to absorb shocks, go through challenges, and bounce back even stronger than before and thrive.

To the extent that we’ve had these movements—populism, the dissident right, and so on, that I think weaken our ability to be a resilient society—are you optimistic that we’ll have a resurgence of the right kinds of ideas, advancing liberty, advancing the kinds of virtue that will make us a resilient nation for the next 250 years?

SLADE: In general, I’m very hopeful because I think a lot of people—I alluded to this a minute ago—wrote off fusionism and the ideas that I’ve been talking about, those commitments, those philosophical ideas, as dead, as if they died with the new millennium, suited to the Cold War era, but they’re not suited to today, and they’re not coming back. Reagan-style conservatism is not coming back.

Maybe Reaganism is not coming back. That’s probably true. But I think fusionism is something that has eternal relevance. These are eternal truths that we need liberty and virtue in order to flourish. And a good society needs both those things.

And so, I think as long as we have people who are continuing to pursue the good things in life and pursue the truth, then there is a fighting chance for the things that I think are true to make that resurgence. And I think we’re starting to see it now. I think there’s been a whole series of things just in the last year—let’s say a couple years—that suggests that this counter-mobilization that I’ve described is starting to take on, and that the idea that “the dissident right approach to politics is the future for sure, that’s already been determined”—that was a premature judgment that people made.

This is a live fight right now and it is being fought in the battle of ideas, of political organization, and all of the rest. It’s being fought right now. We’re getting to live through that, which makes this a very interesting time. It means the outcome is still uncertain, but I do think it could go either way, and I am hopeful.

There were not a lot of people who thought that the Soviet Union was about to collapse right until it did, right? People were taken by surprise because it seemed like these ideas were on the march, they were on the ascendant. Many people thought we were losing to the Soviets, losing the Cold War. We didn’t realize how weak and how internally hollow those institutions actually were from the outside.

I think something like that is actually true of these dissident right ideas and institutions. They look very powerful. They’re capturing mindshare among young people, and that is the thing that makes me most nervous about all of this. They certainly are associated with the current administration, especially both the president and Vice President J.D. Vance, who is very much a leading member of the dissident right, but I think their ideas actually can’t sustain the weight that they want them to, whereas I think ours can. So that’s what makes me hopeful.

KLUTSEY: Stephanie Slade, on that hopeful note, thank you very much for joining A Resilient Republic. Really appreciate it.

SLADE: Thank you so much, Ben.

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

BEN KLUTSEY: Charisma is one of those words we use frequently, but don’t quite understand fully. We know it when we see it, or think we do. But what exactly are we responding to when a leader walks into a room and something shifts? What does it mean for a republic like ours when certain individuals have had significant sway on the populace during different periods throughout our history? My guest today has spent years trying to answer those questions.

Professor Molly Worthen is the author of Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, a fascinating and wide-ranging account of the influence of charismatic leaders on American life, which is the main subject of our conversation today.

Professor Worthen, thanks for joining me today.

MOLLY WORTHEN: Thanks for having me.

What is charisma?

KLUTSEY: Well, most of us think we know what charisma is. We associate it with charm, celebrity, or a certain magnetism, but your book suggests we’ve been misreading it. What do most people get wrong about charisma? And what does it actually require from the leader and from the audience?

WORTHEN: I was certainly confused about charisma when I started this research, and it’s a major reason why I was interested in the subject and interested in the intersection between charisma in the original sense of the word—a word that we get from ancient Greek via the New Testament—and charisma in the sense that we use it in everyday conversation.

Theologically, it’s a word that, in the context of the Bible, means an unbidden gift from God, an act of grace. Paul uses it in his letters to mean different things. It can mean the free gift of salvation to all believing Christians, or specific gifts of the spirit: healing, speaking in tongues, this kind of thing. And for most of the past 2,000 years, that’s where the word stayed.

But a bit more than a century ago, the German sociologist Max Weber borrowed the word from the world of biblical studies and retooled it in an effort to give his colleagues in the burgeoning new social science disciplines a way to talk about this X factor, this form of authority that seemed to exist separate from a leader’s place in an institution, or having a big military, or some claim on tradition, had something to do with this force in the leader as a person and the relationship that he was able to craft with followers. But from there, the word is filtered into our vocabulary. And I think it’s often a term we punt to, when we are observing a dynamic between a leader and followers and we don’t really get it, and we have a sense that there is something going on there, but it’s not obvious to us why these people are so attracted to this individual.

So when I started this project, I very much confused charisma with charm. I thought I would be writing about loads of very charming people with very high emotional intelligence, really good at working the room at a cocktail party. I thought they would all be amazing public speakers. And those qualities show up here and there in my cast of characters, but really more as the exception than the rule.

The pattern that I found was that charisma is deeply polarizing. A charismatic person generally has a lot of people who think he or she is just irresistible, and a lot of people who find the person totally revolting, and not a whole lot of people who are just lukewarm.

So the definition I ended up settling on is that charisma is a relationship between a leader and followers based on a particular kind of storytelling. Charisma is a leader’s ability to invite potential followers into a new, transcendent narrative about what their life means and how it connects to a much bigger story. I think, as humans, we are constantly hungry for a sense that our puny, mortal lives and all of our suffering and chaos actually means something. We’re looking to slot it into a bigger story. And often, we get dissatisfied with the stories that are on offer in the culture, that institutions and elites are telling us. And so, a successful charismatic leader is one who comes along and says, “Here, let me tell you a new story. Let me arrange the facts you think you know into a new pattern and give you a new sense of your role and your agency, but also reassure you that it’s not all up to you, that you are also in the thrall of a bigger power.” And that helped me draw a throughline across four centuries of history and make sense of how certain leaders have resonated with different groups of people at different points in our history as a country.

KLUTSEY: On your point about polarization, is that inevitable of charismatic leaders? Is it a structural thing, or is it just incidental?

WORTHEN: I think it’s inevitable. And I think it has to do with what makes a good story. A good story doesn’t include lovely, heroic roles for everybody. It has to have villains, it has to have some heroes who really at the center, and then other people who are left out. So I think that our reaction to a leader has everything to do with whether that leader is offering us an attractive role in the story that he or she is telling.

Max Weber’s definition of charisma

KLUTSEY: And you mentioned Max Weber earlier, his definition. He uses the term creative power, I think. In your studying of this, what do you think Weber got wrong or missed in his studies of charismatic leaders?

WORTHEN: That’s a great question. I love Max Weber. He’s one of my heroes. I so admire his omnivorous intellectual curiosity. The man wrote about everything from the economics of German farming life to Hinduism, and everything in between. And I think he was a really perceptive student of Western culture and specifically of American culture. I got really into learning more about not just his writings, but also the time he and his wife, Marianne, spent touring the United States around 1904, and some time they spent at the World’s Fair in St. Louis.

It was so interesting to me that he was developing his definition of charisma at the very same time that charisma, in that original New Testament sense, the sense of the Holy Spirit falling on people, was also exploding in the Pentecostal revivals that really launched modern Pentecostalism right at the turn of the century.

So, I think that Weber got more right than not. He famously called himself, in reference to his own lack of religious faith, “religiously unmusical,” as in a kind of tone deafness, which I don’t think he was really doing justice to himself and his perception there. But perhaps he didn’t fully appreciate the way in which charisma in the New Testament sense remains, I think, quite intertwined with charisma in the sense that he was identifying. And to me, the two are related, if separate phenomena.

One of my goals in the book is to make secular and religious people a bit more legible to each other. I think that, as human beings, we have a fairly fundamental religious impulse. And it’s there, regardless of our own metaphysics or whether we go to a house of worship on weekends. We have this desire to connect ourselves to a transcendent narrative, to a source of power outside ourselves. And whether you do that in the course of activities that you think of as totally secular and in the lane of modern, pluralistic politics, or whether you do that in a house of worship, perhaps those are not totally alien, unrelated phenomena, and we can see some similarities across the differences.

Political charisma

KLUTSEY: In the book, you use the term political charisma. I wonder if that is a distinct category, or it’s mostly used to refer to politicians or people in politics who happen to be charismatic?

WORTHEN: These are terms that are partly terms of convenience. I think part of being a historian is you are bringing to life the tremendous variety of just weird, fascinating human behavior. It’s also your burden as a scholar to make some generalizations. So in the book, I try to step back and forth between characters for whom the primary arena was mainstream, secular, national politics, and those for whom the primary arena was more religious. But there are so many interesting cases. There’s probably no figure in the book who is purely in one or the other, right?

I start the book with the story of the infamous Puritan heretic Anne Hutchinson who really got under the skin of the magistrates and clergy of Massachusetts Bay in the mid-1630s, because she started having these weekly and then twice-weekly discussion sessions at her house, first just for women, but then the women would bring their husbands, ostensibly to just have a friendly discussion of the sermon the previous Sunday. But it turned out she had a lot of critical things to say about the ministers and thought that most of them preached what, in her view, was an incorrect, heretical message that you can earn your salvation—very much not in line with her understanding of salvation as a free gift from God.

Now that sounds like a totally religious matter. How could that have political implications? But certainly, in Puritan Massachusetts Bay, there was no separating the two. And once the disciplinary machinery of the colony got churning against her, she was put on trial twice. She had a trial at the hands of church officials and was found guilty of heresy, essentially. But then she also had a civil trial that resulted in her banishment.

Now we can say, “Okay, well, that’s the Puritan’s theocracy. They didn’t separate religion and politics.” But I think the connection between religious authority, our sense of authority, and the priorities we seek in worldly government remains in place.

I got fascinated by the career of the Pan-Africanist nationalist Marcus Garvey and the kind of political theology that he brought to bear as he built up his organization, The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), in Harlem in the 1910s and early 1920s. This organization was for a brief period the largest mass movement of people of African descent in the world, in history, up until that point.

His vision was one that was political as well as theological. His speeches—we should really call them sermons—are shot through with religious language calling on his audience to recover their true sense of identity. It’s a sense of divine chosenness as a race for whom God intends a very specific destiny, but it’s a destiny with political implications, which he began to map out in a vision for taking a certain degree of political control over parts of the African continent as well as a vision for black economic autonomy. And I think it’s the very fact of the kind of inherent political power on display in the UNIA mass rallies and parades, hundreds of people dressed in resplendent uniforms, and the signal that sent to white authorities that led to him being arrested on trumped-up charges of mail fraud, and put in prison, and eventually deported.

So, I don’t think it’s ever totally possible to separate the religious from the political.

Arranging the history of charisma

KLUTSEY: Now, as a scholar, which charismatic leader first captured your attention? And was there a chronology to how you worked through the figures in the book? Did you follow the history forward, or did one figure lead you to another? To me, it seemed chronological initially, but then it varies across.

WORTHEN: Broadly, I was trying to find a way to tell a story, which is a challenging thing. One hazard of this project was that every time I would tell somebody I was writing a book about charisma, they would immediately have in mind 10 people that surely I’m going to include, right? I’m constantly disappointing them.

I sought initially for a mix of characters I’ll call “usual suspects”—big, famous people that the average reader will expect to find in a history of charisma. I thought, “Okay, I’ve got to say something about George Washington. John F. Kennedy has to be in there. Got to deal with Napoleon. Got to deal with Hitler.” But then I wanted to leaven the narrative with a number of unexpected figures who might surprise the reader, who might seem at first glance to not bear a clear connection to the narrative they think they know about political leadership in this country, but whose presence in the narrative would really help illuminate the story that they think they know.

So, for example, I divide the narrative of American history into these epochs in which a particular charismatic style—a flavor of charismatic storytelling, you might say—is really culturally ascendant. And most of the 19th century is consumed by the era I call “the era of the conquerors.” That period includes some obvious conquerors. I write about Andrew Jackson, I write about Napoleon, but I also got very interested in what I’ll call “metaphysical conquest.”

I plunged into the founding story of the Mormon church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the way in which Joseph Smith, in really an act of religious genius, responded to many people’s frustrations with the kind of post-Puritan mainstream Protestantism of the Jacksonian era, but blended his imaginative, theological vision with a vision of conquest, conquest both of the American continent and in that early Mormon vision prioritized not just building a new Zion—what eventually becomes the Mormon kingdom in the Great Salt Lake Basin—but also evangelizing and assimilating Native Americans, who they believe to be the descendants of an ancient Semitic people, essentially a lost Israelite tribe called the Lamanites, who are the bad guys in the Book of Mormon narrative. But they are crucial to the early Mormon understanding of what it means to really awaken God’s people to their true identity, including Native Americans, and restore this North American plotline to the divine story. And this, in addition to a whole cosmology that Joseph Smith developed, in which there are tiers of heaven and living a devout Mormon life—it culminates with an eternal existence in the celestial kingdom. It’s really a vision of manifest destiny, but on a cosmic scale. Again, it’s a kind of conquest.

So that was my basic plan, also allowing for the fact that sometimes you just discover characters who you didn’t know existed, and you get sucked into their story and you have to follow your nose. So, there’s a little bit of that as well.

The five archetypes of charisma

KLUTSEY: Yes. I wondered [about] your five archetypes—the prophets, the conquerors, the agitators, the experts, and the gurus—were there a couple of figures that were hardest to classify and why? I imagine that there are probably a handful of them that were incredibly difficult because they overlapped, or maybe even all five of the archetypes.

WORTHEN: This is something that I learned from Max Weber. Max Weber was a great typologist who was not afraid of giving his readers straightforward, definitive theories about how humans operate. Any theory like that, any typology that purports to sort charismatic leaders across American history into five categories, obviously it’s going to be wrong here and there, right? But it’s fun to think with, and I stand by it as a useful tool.

One pattern I began to notice fairly early in my research was that leaders who stood out to me as successful—if by success we mean able to instantiate their policy visions, their ideas, their narrative of what America is about in a set of procedures and institutions that outlive their personal career—that’s one definition of success. It tended to accrue not to leaders who stuck narrowly to the ascendant charismatic type of their age, but rather to those leaders who showed a certain agility, a certain flexible ability to adapt, to sense what kinds of charismatic story was resonating with people, but then to maybe combine that with other lessons from other ways of connecting with an audience.

An example of this is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in the beginning of his career very much channeled a desire in those early years of the Great Depression among Americans for simply a voice of reason and cool order. If you listen to his early radio fireside chats, you hear him trying to really summon Americans to the most reasonable version of themselves. He’s inviting them to turn over the reins to his class of experts, his brains trust, and those experts who are developing this phalanx of relatively technical solutions to American problems. And I think his early success is a testament to the way he detected an appetite for that in an era that was generally one of quite a lot of chaos. And it’s an era that I label in my narrative, “the era of the agitator,” in which so many charismatic leaders are anti-institutional, anti-expert grenade-throwers, essentially.

But a few years later, he begins to struggle with greater and greater political threat from his left flank. And I focus especially on the threat of the great Louisiana populist, Huey Long, who was sort of an agitator par excellence. And as he became more and more grumpy that FDR didn’t give him adequate credit for his own political success—Long thought that he’d really played a significant role in getting FDR elected—Long becomes very critical of the New Deal, calling it essentially too conservative, not a radical enough solution. He’s got his own set of proposals, the Share Our Wealth Plan, and he’s this very flamboyant character. And it was so interesting to read accounts of FDR’s rallies in 1934, responding to this populist threat on the left, and his own speech writers and advisors standing offstage, watching FDR and Madison Square Garden and thinking, “Who is this guy? He sounds like a demagogue. He’s going on about evil Wall Street fat cats and this sort of thing. Is this the man we work for?” And they’re horrified.

But this is FDR taking a page from the agitators to his left and cheating in that direction, even though he’s not going whole hog. So some of the most striking case studies in leadership in the book are those that don’t narrowly fit these categories.

Kwame Nkrumah and charisma in an international context

KLUTSEY: One figure who caught my attention was Kwame Nkrumah. I grew up in Ghana, West Africa, so I was very intrigued by this. His inclusion made sense, but I was surprised to find him placed under the expert archetype rather than the prophet, right? Given his Pan-African vision, his almost messianic ambition to unite an entire continent, and the spiritual register of his rhetoric—he had a kind of soaring cadence with his rhetoric, very much like MLK Jr. He seemed prophetic to me. So what drove that classification, and what does it reveal about how the eras or archetypes work at their edges?

WORTHEN: I completely agree with you. And he’s important in the narrative, not so much because he embodies the archetype of expert charisma, but because he’s part of the story of how especially American journalists, scholars, and observers in different subcultures think about the development of leadership in an international context.

So this part of the narrative is really about the long after-effects of World War II and this sense in the aftermath of the war that is held by many academics and thought-leader types that the shorthand for charisma is Adolf Hitler. And if that’s what charismatic demagoguery and [a] emotional relationship with followers, if that’s where it leads to, this sort of maniacal genocide, then charisma has no place in a modern, Western democracy. That’s the lesson.

And so, what follows is about 20 years. It’s this anomalous period in American history when experts and the story that experts tell has the charisma. Otherwise, I think American history is shot through with a real ambivalence toward experts. But there is a tendency in this period to trust the technocrats in the Kennedy administration and this story about America: “If you trust the expert class, they will spread democracy around the world. They will get us to the moon.” Part of this is a story about the world.

And I was so fascinated to watch this generation of social scientists who were writing about the newly independent countries in the global south, trying to piece together a big theory of modernization and a sense of how civilizations develop over time. They began to use the word charisma to describe leaders in newly independent African countries, as a way of identifying this survival of, what was in their view, a pre-modern, inappropriately religious dimension to the connection between this new class of political leaders and their followers that really, in their view, had no place in civilizations, countries they saw as more modern, more developed. I think this was a huge blind spot. I think they lean into this narrative in which the dynamics between Kwame Nkrumah and his constituents are this kind of holdover from an earlier way of relationship between leader and follower that they think is a growing-pains phase that Europeans and Americans have outgrown. And they’re just wrong about that.

But Nkrumah, I think he had a certain agility. I was so fascinated to learn about the way he leveraged his time in Western universities and the elaborate, often very technical quality of his ideological writings that combine different ways of claiming authority into one. But I completely agree with you that one of his major registers was the prophetic.

How media shapes charisma

KLUTSEY: Now each era seems to produce a medium that charismatic leaders learn to inhabit: lyceums, radio, television, and social media. But does technology merely amplify charisma, or does it actually reshape what charisma looks like? I imagine FDR, as you mentioned earlier, may have required a different kind of charisma that JFK’s televised debates needed to be a little bit different. What does that tell us about the present moment and the kinds of technologies that charismatic leaders have to inhabit or learn to shape?

WORTHEN: This is a great question, and it’s one that has really limited historians’ study of charisma. I think there’s been this assumption among many scholars who are interested in the topic that it really doesn’t make sense to even talk about charisma before the age of mass media—that there’s some intrinsic relationship between charismatic leadership and mass media in the modern sense. I think that rules out a whole range of interesting questions about continuity over the long arc of American history.

Where I landed was to conclude that mastery of the age’s most powerful means of mass communication is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of building a charismatic movement. So I’m not sure I could point to a charismatic movement of any lasting consequence where you don’t see successful use of media. And indeed, this is an important part of understanding how charisma travels. And for me, tracing the relationship and the use of media was part of the process of decoupling the power of charisma from the individual leader. The leader is important, but charisma is not just a matter of this ineffable, electric relationship that you have when you are in the presence a leader in a rally or something like this.

A case where this came home to me early on in my research was in tracing out the career of the early Mormons. I became fascinated by these hundreds, north of a thousand, Mormon converts in the United Kingdom who convert to the Mormon faith very early, within a few years of Joseph Smith founding the church. These individuals pack up their lives in the UK. They move across the Atlantic, sight unseen, to this tiny town on the banks of the Mississippi, Nauvoo, Illinois, where their prophet has set up shop. But they’ve never laid eyes on the guy. So it can’t be a story of succumbing to the personal, compelling presence of Joseph Smith. Something else is going on.

It’s an encounter with a story. They are encountering the story of the Book of Mormon, which, of course, features Smith as a major character. He’s important. They’re encountering it through missionaries, through reading the Book of Mormon themselves. And so it’s always the media. The media is the medium through which the story travels.

I think that is what has enabled charismatic leaders in our own time to so successfully cordon-off the story that they are telling their followers from other sources of information. As we have seen the media landscape polarize and fracture, I think it’s become easier for a leader to silo-off followers in the narrative that he or she is crafting. Of course, it’s a story that accelerates with the internet, but it’s a narrative that predates the internet. You can see so many of the core dynamics that have become familiar talking points among people who lament the state of polarized social media and echo chambers. You see all of that certainly by the time Rush Limbaugh is really at his peak in the 1990s.

I think, though, that charismatic leaders in our own time have an outsized cultural authority precisely because institutions are so weak. Charismatic leaders across American history have existed in this kind of delicate, symbiotic relationship of action and reaction with institutions. But I think in the past, more Americans had a stronger, more coherent relationship with institutions and with traditions, all of which provided alternative narratives. So if you’re hearing a guru, a would-be leader, making a sales pitch to you, you hear it. But then, you’ve got other contexts that are functioning as sounding boards. And my suspicion is that in our own time, we are so atomized that we don’t have that thick, embedded sense of connection with these other stories.

Does America generate more charismatic leaders?

KLUTSEY: Now, does America generate charismatic leaders with unusual frequency and intensity, or is that itself a myth? Is there something distinctive about American political culture, its notion of the self-made man, its distrust of inherited authority that makes it especially fertile ground for charismatic leaders to emerge? Maybe not. What do you think?

WORTHEN: I think, for sure, the story I’m telling in this book is very much an American story. There are certain features of the charismatic relationships I’m describing in the book that I think suggest questions and interesting lines of inquiry that apply to other cultures. And the book, as you note, I talk about Nkrumah. I talk about other non-American figures who are operating in conversation with and informing the American story.

But the marrow of the plot of the book is really a story about the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and the way in which the Protestant Reformation cracked open the Catholic Church’s effective monopoly on European connections with the divine and a monopoly on the charismatic story, charisma in both the religious and political sense. And then following the aftermath in this particular American narrative, in which certain dimensions of the Protestant Reformation metastasize that seed of radical individualism, Martin Luther’s insistence that the core of reality is your relationship with your God, God’s justification of you as an individual, and this is in some fundamental way an interior matter that has to do with the state of your conscience—that, of course, for Luther, was not a call to anarchy. He was an institution man in many ways, whatever you make of his “priesthood of all believers” slogan. In the form that impulse takes in America because of a confluence of factors, the messy mix of European immigrants from a range of religious and cultural backgrounds, in conjunction with the particular set of political compromises that the founding fathers come up with—the First Amendment and the disestablishment of religion at a federal level—creates the most open religious marketplace in the world at the time. It’s totally unprecedented.

And so there’s a way in which America becomes this haven for spiritual entrepreneurship, you could say. And it’s also a country with a pretty unique suspicion of centralized authority and institutions in a way that I think has destabilized the authority of institutions in a way that’s quite different from Canada or peer countries in Europe, and that, too, has empowered charismatic leaders.

KLUTSEY: Can charisma help restore that?

WORTHEN: Yes, in so far as charisma is morally neutral, and that’s so important to remember. I’m so glad you asked this question.

I think we tend to use the word charisma in a very charged way. Either we deploy it as a compliment or we use it to describe a kind of snake oil, morally dubious act of manipulation on the part of a leader. And it’s important to stress, in my view, charisma is a dynamic that exists between a leader and followers. Whether a charismatic leader is an agent of moral progress or not has everything to do with whether the story he or she is telling is fundamentally grounded in empirical reality.

So, I write about Martin Luther King Jr. in the book. While being far from a morally flawless person, I think it’s more than fair to say the charismatic movement that he built was an agent of moral progress, precisely because the story he was inviting followers into was not a confected story. It was an invitation to see the facts of their lives in a new light. For African Americans, it was an invitation to reclaim a sense of agency and see themselves as protagonists in a new way, who were not trapped, but could act and act as change agents in history. And then, of course, he was also simply engaging in a prolonged act of waking up white Americans to this reality that they were only dimly conscious of.

And I think that’s in stark contrast to charismatic leaders who absolutely have acted only in the interests of their own power, often with deeply murderous consequences. And when we think about the ideologies and the stories with the most vile consequences, whether you want to look at Nazi ideology or anything in that mode, I think our attention is immediately drawn to the series of simply false claims about humanity and about the good and evil that go into the building of those stories.

So the task for the citizen, for the average person, is to develop a way to fairly evaluate these stories. I think that’s precisely the challenge of responsible citizenship in our own time. It’s become harder to do just that.

What charismatic archetype comes next?

KLUTSEY: Your book ends with President Trump, but obviously history doesn’t end there. If each era generates the charismatic form it needs or deserves, what comes next?

And here is a bit of an unfair question because I’m asking you to forecast a little bit. But can you anticipate the archetype that’s already forming in response to the current moment?

WORTHEN: Boy, I would like to think we’ve hit peak guru as a culture, I hope. I do think there are signs of real exhaustion with the kind of radically anti-institutional, anti-establishment flavor of our current era.

I’m very intrigued by some of the unexpected patterns among younger Americans, Gen Z especially. It is an exaggeration to call their renewed interest in organized religion a revival. I think that’s too strong. But something’s going on.

We’ve seen now for a few years that a plateauing in the number of Americans who call themselves “without any religious affiliation whatsoever.” And we’ve seen a slight, but noticeable, uptick in rates of religious profession and church attendance among millennials and Gen Z, and especially among young men, which, I need to stress, has never happened in the history of modern sociology of Western religion. It’s always women who outnumber men in the pews. And something is happening.

And when I combine these broad demographic shifts, which are not limited to America—there’s interesting poll data coming out of the United Kingdom. France has seen more baptisms in the Catholic Church there than it has for 20 years or more and some of the Scandinavian countries.

When I put those poll numbers into dialogue with conversations I have with my own students, in which a growing number of them just seem to see through the lies that they’ve been told about what constitutes happiness and freedom in modern culture, the lies they’ve been told about their little glowing rectangle as the key to happiness. A surprising number of them are radically unplugging from social media and seeking out in-person relationships. So I think there is a craving for a rootedness and a sense of institutional connection.

But in some important respects, we can’t put the genie back into the bottle. So there’s a way in which the legacy of the second half of the 20th century in America, the post-1960s cult of personal authenticity, the message of the positive psychologists that you are fundamentally a beautiful flower or snowflake—whatever your preferred metaphor—and as soon as you free yourself from the strictures of tradition and the rules of other people, you can fully realize your authentic self. There is some version of that that continues to persist, and I think it infects someone who has become a quite ardent convert to traditional religion. There’s a way in which they bring the 20th century with them into that relationship. So, we certainly will not see a reversion to some earlier period of strong religious institutions. We’ll see the fruit of the ongoing historical dialectic.

KLUTSEY: You anticipated my question because I was going to ask, given that you teach courses like God and Government in America or Sin and Evil in Modern America, what are you seeing amongst your students and whether this—you mentioned the data on young people embracing religion a bit more. I guess it’s deepening. You’re seeing it as a kind of religious seriousness. And whether that sustains over a long period of time or not, I guess it is yet to be seen.

WORTHEN: That’s right, but it’s clear that there’s a real spiritual hunger right now.

A call to self-awareness

KLUTSEY: Yes. Now, studying charisma this closely, spending years inside the logic of how it works, how it seduces, how it manipulates, or how it moves people towards a more moral world, did it change how you experience it yourself? Do you find yourself more susceptible or more immune? And honestly, did you discover any of it in yourself?

WORTHEN: I suppose writing the book has made me more conscious of my own hunger for a story with meaning. I don’t see myself as immune from the broad patterns I’m describing in the book. In many ways, the book is presenting just a theory of what humans are like.

So, I suppose it has wrought for me a lesson that I hope it offers to readers more broadly, and that is a call to self-awareness. There’s almost a spiritual discipline that comes out of being attuned to the power for good or for evil that charismatic leaders have in our culture. And that’s a set of questions that I think we are called to pose to ourselves whenever we feel ourselves compelled by a leader in a way that is tugging on us with new power, but also maybe, more importantly, a set of questions we should ask ourselves when we are struggling to understand our fellow voters or people in another unfamiliar cultural context who are convinced by a leader whose message we find repellent.

I think that it’s important to not stop with the feeling of revulsion and turn away, but to ask, “Okay, what is the story that this leader is telling? And why do I find it so revolting? Is it that he’s telling a false story?” And maybe that’s true. Or, “is it that he’s offering me a role that is deeply unflattering and not in line with how I see myself?” And, well, then, if that’s the case, that should prompt a new round of conversation.

And it’s also an invitation to see categories of people who can sometimes seem very alien, right? If you’re a personally religious person, secular people are baffling and vice versa. It’s a call to see the common substrate of hunger for the transcendent that is there for all of us.

Charismatic leadership and resilience

KLUTSEY: Now, as we wrap up, this podcast is about resilience. By that, I mean the ability of a society, its institutions, and its people to absorb shocks, adapt, innovate and bounce back stronger from challenges. To what extent do you think charismatic leaders can contribute to the kind of resilience that we hope to see, or do they undermine resilience? I think given your previous answers on it being neutral, it all depends, you might say.

WORTHEN: It depends, and I also think it’s useful to distinguish between the career of particular leaders and mass movements and the careers of the stories, which are often much more long lived.

Charisma, as a means of authority, is usually the refuge of the weak. If you as a leader have access to more reliable mechanisms of power, if you have access to high elected office, you have a large military force at your command, you would be much better off putting your chips on those levers of power. So throughout history, those leaders who turn to charisma and rely on a transcendent narrative as a way of fomenting a following, they often do so because they have no other options. They’re closed off from access to institutions, whether it’s because they’re women, or non-white, or otherwise have a marginal status because of their eccentric theologies—you name it.

But there’s a way in which even a movement or a leader whose career is just this brief effervescence can have a very long tail. I would say that while Anne Hutchinson managed to keep a following energized behind her only for a matter of months and ended up banished and murdered in an Indian attack in the Bronx shortly after she was banished, there’s a way in which she had the last laugh. When I think to myself, “Who had more to do with the abiding character of what becomes the American, evangelical Protestant tradition and its vision of the individual’s direct line to the divine for confirmation of personal assurance?” I see that in Anne Hutchinson rather than the Puritan town fathers who had their victory over her in the courtroom in Massachusetts Bay.

So, I like taking the long view of these questions. That’s a historian’s job.

Conclusion

KLUTSEY: Well, Professor Molly Worthen, thank you so much for joining us today. This book, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, it’s one of the most interesting books I have read in a very, very long time. So thank you for writing it.

WORTHEN: Thanks for having me. This has been fun.

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

BEN KLUTSEY: Today my guest is Jeff Rosen. He is CEO emeritus of the National Constitution Center, a professor of law at George Washington University, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. He has written several best-selling books, including The Pursuit of Happiness, a favorite of mine, and his latest book, The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle over Power in America, which is the subject of our conversation today.

Jeff is one of America’s leading constitutional scholars and a widely respected voice on the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the American founding. Thanks for joining me.

JEFF ROSEN: It’s great to be with you, and congratulations on the new podcast. So exciting.

KLUTSEY: Thank you, thank you.

The fragile American experiment

KLUTSEY: The book is a fascinating story of the debate on how best to pursue liberty strong national government to guarantee liberty, or a weaker national government to ensure it doesn’t override individual and state rights. It’s really interesting, and I’m eager to get into some of the key points here.

The first thing, really, I think your book vividly captures how tenuous the American experiment felt in its earliest years—Shays’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Sedition Act, the vicious Adams–Jefferson election. Looking back, just how fragile was the republic in those first decades? It seemed to me that survival itself was quite uncertain in the early days.

ROSEN: It was indeed, which is why most of the founders at the time of their deaths were uncertain about whether or not the experiment would succeed.

George Washington, famously, in his farewell address, warns of the danger of faction. Hamilton despairs, almost the day before the due,l that the real threat to America is democracy, which he puts in capital letters. Jefferson rightly fears the Union fracturing over civil war. Only Madison is slightly more optimistic because he expects less of the virtue of the people, because he has put structural constraints into the Constitution to slow down deliberation.

But none of them is sure that it will succeed. And when Adams and Jefferson die on the same day, July 4, 1826, many comment that it’s a miracle that the Republic has thrived for as long as it has.

Forged in conflict

KLUTSEY: Now, one of the striking themes in the book is that America’s institutions were forged through conflict rather than consensus. Do you think America’s resilience emerged not despite these tensions but because the system was forced to absorb and channel them—like it is because of these tensions that we are resilient? What are your thoughts on that?

ROSEN: Yes, I do think so. I think of the competing ideas of Hamilton and Jefferson over national power versus states rights, and democracy versus rule by elites, and liberal versus strict construction of the Constitution, as golden and silver threads woven throughout the tapestry of American history. That’s the image that came to my mind. Sometimes they’re side by side, sometimes they cross, sometimes they pull so far apart that they threaten to snap, but it is the productive tension on both sides of the threads that has sustained the American experiment. And on the rare occasions when we’ve pulled too far in one direction or another, that’s when the violence begins.

Radical ideas at America’s founding

KLUTSEY: Yes. You note that Jefferson believed the Constitution should effectively expire after about 19 years, roughly one generation. I had no idea that was one of the things that was discussed. How radical is that idea? And to at least the folks around at the time, was that an unusual idea?

ROSEN: Yes, it was extraordinarily radical. It was connected to his idea that no one generation should be able to impose a debt on another. He thought a generation was about 19 years. Which is why, according to some accounts, he thought that public debts should expire and should not have to be paid by subsequent generations—an incredible irony, of course, given the fact that he himself lived so wildly beyond his means, like a kind of emperor or Caligula at Monticello, that he died with crushing debts that he imposed on his daughters, and his entire estate and all of the enslaved people on it had to be sold to pay his debts.

But it was quite radical. And Madison, for example, did not agree with Jefferson. He thought it was a miracle that the first convention had succeeded. It would be tempting fate to try another, and therefore best to leave well enough alone.

It was connected to Jefferson’s also radical view that the will of the majority should always prevail, which led him to suggest, at times, that when the people disagreed with Supreme Court opinions, there should be an intervening election or a constitutional convention. But he was very ahead of his time in his embracing of democracy and also of frequent constitutional conventions.

KLUTSEY: Yes. And for Hamilton, he argued that we must have a government with more power, and at points, even flirted with lifetime tenure for presidents and senators, while openly admiring aspects of the English system. What was Hamilton really trying to solve for?

ROSEN: He was trying to solve for the danger of a self-interested, Caesar-like demagogue who would come and flatter the people and persuade them to exchange their liberties for cheap luxuries, like bread and circuses, and install himself as a dictator. It seems like an unusual suggestion, but in that notorious speech at the convention at the beginning of June, which went on for six hours, he proposed a president elected for life because he thought that such a president would be able to look to the public interest, rather than tending to the interests of factions or to his own corrupt financial interests.

His model is the British king, although he always emphasized—although Jefferson attacked him as a monarchist and monocrat—that he did not believe in hereditary monarchy, so he considered himself a republican. But the goal was to put the president above ordinary politics.

The idea was not as crazy as it sounds now. Different delegates at different times, including James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris, supported a lifetime-elected president. So it was something of a federalist shibboleth. But it didn’t go anywhere at the convention, obviously, and it was too much for the delegates.

KLUTSEY: In your previous book, The Pursuit of Happiness, you talk about their interest in virtues and cultivating virtues for themselves. Did they not believe that it was possible for the people to also cultivate similar virtues of temperance, prudence, courage, justice, and those kinds of things, which meant that maybe some of these radical ideas may not have been necessary?

ROSEN: Well, they certainly hoped that it was possible, and they did think that the experiment would only succeed if the people found the personal self-government to make possible political self-government, but they weren’t sure that it could succeed on a wide scale. It had never been tried before, and it was expecting a tremendous amount of ordinary people. And this was a time when the franchise was beginning to be expanded, and never before in human history had so much expectation been put on the individual for self-perfection.

And that’s why so many of them emphasized education. Jefferson, the greatest champion of democracy, puts three achievements on his tombstone: author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Virginia Bill for Religious Freedom, and founder of the University of Virginia. And for him, that was far more important than his presidency, because it educated the next generation to be “republican machines,” as some of the founders put it.

And George Washington never lost his advocacy of a national university that would bring together citizens of different backgrounds to set aside their parochial and geographic interests and learn two things: the habits of the science of government and the habits of civil deliberation. And every president since Washington supported the national university to a certain degree, especially enthusiastically John Quincy Adams, and Grant after the Civil War. But because of concerns about federalism and uncertainty about whether or not Congress had the power to charter the national university, that idea never was totally embraced—although George Washington University, where I teach, was started up partly by a bequest from Washington in his will. So it was the closest that Washington came to achieving his goal.

The growth of the administrative state

KLUTSEY: One thing that modern readers often, I think, forget is how tiny the federal government originally was. As I was reading your book, I came across these interesting details: that Treasury had only a few dozen employees, Jefferson’s State Department had six people, the Department of War only two. I wonder to what extent that shaped the founders’ debates about liberty and federal power, and I wonder what they would say now about how large the federal government apparatus is.

ROSEN: Well, it’s certainly true that Jefferson and Hamilton have completely different views about the relationship between liberty and power. For Jefferson, every increase in government power threatens liberty. For Hamilton, more vigorous governments can secure liberty. But as you suggest, the vigorous government for Hamilton was a handful of employees. And he’s the guy who’s pulling these all-nighters and writing his reports on public credit all by himself without any speechwriters. So, they certainly didn’t imagine the scope of the modern administrative state.

Now, there’s a lot of interesting debate about whether or not Hamilton in particular would have supported administrative agencies. It’s actually relevant in the Supreme Court cases about the administrative agencies. And there’s evidence that Madison, for example, supported an independent controller of the Treasury. And this is what those who argue that the framers would have accepted a version of the administrative state are trying to argue before the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that they would have been shocked—shocked at the sheer scope of the modern administrative state. When Franklin Roosevelt decided to make Jefferson the patron saint of the New Deal, it can only be described as what my people would call an act of chutzpah, because he was exploding the size of the federal government in ways that would have made the libertarian sage of Monticello cringe.

On the other hand, they weren’t unimaginative. They believed that government would adapt to the times. Many had great ambitions about the growth of America, in particular Jefferson, who imagined an “empire of liberty” spreading slowly across the continent to the west, one which included the forced removal of Native Americans and the spread of slavery. But it was nevertheless his hope that eventually America would grow, and with it its government. And of course, it was Jefferson who doubled the size of the United States with his Louisiana Purchase, even though he thought it was unconstitutional.

The meaning of the word “necessary”

KLUTSEY: Right. And maybe this next question speaks to this, because it’s about the understandings of the word necessary, within the necessary and proper clause, that are in the constitutional debates. It’s fascinating because it reveals two completely different constitutional philosophies. Jefferson reads necessary narrowly; Hamilton reads it broadly and pragmatically. Was that really the foundational split that continues to shape constitutional interpretation today?

ROSEN: Absolutely, the interpretation of a single word. Bill Clinton said, “It depends on what the meaning of is is,” and the central constitutional debate in all of American history is, “It depends what the meaning of the word necessary is.”

Hamilton proposes the bank as a centerpiece of his plan for public credit, along with the assumption of state debts, and Jefferson insists that it’s unconstitutional. So Washington asks for memos on the question. And Jefferson and Hamilton disagree about the word necessary.

Jefferson wants to construe the word necessary in the necessary and proper clause that gives Congress the power to pass all laws “necessary and proper” for carrying out its enumerated powers. He wants to construe it strictly to mean absolutely, indubitably, or unquestionably necessary. And because he thinks a bank is not absolutely necessary for achieving enumerated powers, like raising taxes or promoting the general welfare, he thinks that the bank is unconstitutional.

Hamilton disagrees. He pulls one of his all-nighters. He writes 14,000 words and he wants to construe the word necessary “liberally,” as he puts it, to mean useful, conducive, or appropriate. And because he thinks the bank is useful, or conducive, or appropriate for promoting the general welfare and raising taxes, he wants to imply the power to raise taxes and promote the general welfare by chartering a bank, even though there’s no enumerated power to charter a bank.

So, just to make it as clear as possible, Jefferson says, “If the power isn’t enumerated, you need the proposed solution to be unquestionably necessary and linked to an enumerated power.”

And Hamilton says, “As long as it’s useful, you can imply the power.”

It goes up to the Supreme Court after Hamilton’s death in McCulloch v. Maryland, and John Marshall sides with Hamilton. He views himself as Hamilton’s successor. He served with Hamilton at Valley Forge. He thinks Hamilton is the greatest American next to Washington. He wants to carry Hamilton’s vision of liberal construction into the new era. And in one of the most famous sentences in constitutional history, he paraphrases Hamilton almost word for word. He has in front of him Hamilton’s memo, because he’s writing George Washington’s biography, and Washington’s nephew, Bushrod Washington, has given Marshall Washington’s papers. And Washington says in this famous paraphrase, “Let the end be legitimate, then all means that are useful or appropriate for carrying it into effect are consistent with the Constitution,” more or less. His paraphrase is even closer to Hamilton than my reconstruction of it was.

And then for the rest of American history, that is the central debate in all of the major Supreme Court cases involving congressional power. It’s the central case over the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise, of the post-Reconstruction Civil Rights Act of 1875, which the court strikes down with Jeffersonian strict construction over the objection of John Marshall Harlan—named by his dad after the great nationalist. It’s the centerpiece of the debates over the constitutionality of the New Deal. And it’s at the center of many of our current debates on the Supreme Court, including the constitutionality of Obamacare.

So for me, the big debate on the court over history has not been between originalism versus non-originalism. It’s been between liberal and strict construction of the Constitution, and particularly of the word necessary.

The contradictions in Jefferson and Hamilton

KLUSTEY: Yes. But I wanted to touch on Jefferson a bit more. Is he principled or pragmatic? He railed against Hamilton, but as president, he kept the national bank and executed the Louisiana Purchase, which dramatically expanded national authority and territory. Should we see Jefferson as hypocritical, pragmatic, or simply a politician who is just confronting the realities of his time?

ROSEN: Well, I think all three of those things. He’s principled in that he gives America the American creed, the most important principles in all of American history, in the Declaration of Independence: liberty, equality, and government by consent. And in his moments of candor, he recognizes the times when he betrays those principles, in particular over slavery, which he never said was consistent with the Declaration. And he said, “I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just.”

On the other hand, he’s a relentlessly, ruthlessly pragmatic politician. He has the world’s best oppo campaign against Hamilton by accusing him of wanting to resurrect monarchy in America. And although his entire program and vision is based on a constrained executive and a balanced budget, he gets into office and he doubles the size of the US purely by executive fiat, even though he thinks it’s unconstitutional and he would have preferred a constitutional amendment.

So you can attack him as a hypocrite and an opportunist, or you can say more charitably, as I’m inclined to do, that like Hamilton, who was similarly inconsistent in applying his own principles—although both Jefferson and Hamilton sometimes betrayed their principles—at least they gave America the gift of principles to debate. And it is their competing principles that we’ve debated over the course of history. The debate has not been a bug in the system, but a feature. And it’s the productive tension between the principles that has prevented us from descending into violence.

And that’s the case for all of the presidents, congresspeople, and Supreme Court justices who have invoked Hamilton and Jefferson over time. They’re constantly switching, mixing, and matching, and Hamiltonians become Jeffersonians. And that wonderful line from Herbert Croly that Theodore Roosevelt adopted, calling for Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends, namely, the Hamiltonian means of strong federal power for the Jeffersonian ends of promoting democracy and curbing the corporations. And FDR comes up with a similar synthesis.

You can say it’s opportunistic, but for me, the deep engagement of our leaders throughout history with the ideas of Hamilton and Jefferson, the fact that they’ve read the primary sources and are willing to debate them, and the fact that almost all of them find themselves on different sides of the Hamiltonian-Jefferson divide at different times of their life, is more a sign of the inspiring endurance of the principles than something that should just be dismissed as opportunistic.

KLUTSEY: Yes. I’m just thinking that a cynic might say, “Every president wants more power, and so they would leverage which argument allows them to do more in whatever circumstance.” Is that too cynical?

ROSEN: No, I think that’s right. Executive power has been expanding since the beginning. Look at the number of executive orders. George Washington issued about 10. It was fewer than that until Lincoln, who had about 50 during the Civil War. It balloons up to about 300 under Theodore Roosevelt, and I think thousands—3,000—under FDR. Then it goes back to several hundred a year for most of the past Democratic and Republican presidents.

So, all presidents are inclined to use executive orders to achieve what they can’t achieve through Congress. And just as significantly, ever since the election of 1912—when both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson insisted that the president was a steward of the people who should directly channel popular will—that’s expanded what Arthur Schlesinger called the imperial presidency, which has continued to swell. And there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans in how much power they are attempting to seize, just as there wasn’t much difference between Hamilton and Jefferson, and Jefferson’s own power grabs once he became president.

So it’s inherent in the nature of the office to want to consolidate power. The framers knew that, and they tried to design a constitution that would constrain the president. What would have surprised the framers is not that the president is trying to constantly aggrandize his own power, but that Congress has become so supine in rubber-stamping the power grabs of presidents of their own parties.

The framers saw Congress as the most dangerous branch, sucking all powers into its impetuous vortex, as Madison so memorably said. And they also thought that the Senate, a group of aristocrats, would check the popular House, just as both would be checked by the independent president and the independent judiciary. So the rise of partisanship to the degree that it stopped Congress in particular from doing its job would have surprised the founders, but the fact that the presidency has engaged in power grabs would not.

What if Hamilton was president?

KLUTSEY: Do you have any reflections on how Hamilton would have governed if he had been president? Or we can just basically guess from the ways in which his ideas lived on through other presidents?

ROSEN: Well, it’s really striking to speculate about. First, we know character is destiny, and Hamilton was extraordinarily hot-headed. That’s why he’s the guy who got the musical. No one’s going to write a musical probably about the Sphinx-like Jefferson, or certainly the temperate Madison.

And he’s constantly picking fights with everyone, not only his enemies like Jefferson, Burr, and eventually Madison, but even his friends like John Adams, who he completely gratuitously attacks during the election of 1800, and George Washington, who’s his patron. And he resigns from Washington’s service because Washington gently upbraids him for keeping him waiting.

He’s incredibly insecure about his illegitimacy and is always on the lookout for people who are demeaning him or questioning his status. And he also does have these strong tendencies toward monarchy, to the degree that Gouverneur Morris, one of his allies and friends, in his eulogy for Hamilton confesses that he never knew whether Hamilton would have followed through on what Morris called “his hobby horse” of wanting to establish a kind of military presence in Spanish Louisiana with himself at the helm, essentially doing what he rightly accused Aaron Burr of doing.

So, really, whether he would have been comfortable with the constitutional system and its constraints is not obvious. On the other hand, he certainly would have been a vigorous leader, and some of our most successful presidents have been vigorous and stretched the bounds of executive power like Lincoln and FDR.

His genius is unquestioned. He was not a great party politician. He never really led the Federalists in any sustained way because he was always picking intramural fights. He tried to change the rules of the election of 1800 to keep Burr from the New York governorship after the election had taken place, which was one of the worst things he ever did.

He called, at the end of his life, for a society for the promotion of Christian virtue to try to inspire virtue, which different people have different views about. And the fact that he never successfully gained meaningful elective office for any period of time suggests that he wasn’t made for politics because he dislikes democracy. I mean, how can you expect someone who literally thinks that the greatest threat to America is popular rule to be a successful popular politician?

Jefferson’s empire of liberty

KLUTSEY: Now Jefferson famously uses the term “empire of liberty” to describe America. That phrase sounds probably paradoxical to modern ears, but what did he mean by that?

ROSEN: He meant that America would spread from east to west—in particular, across the Missouri territories, eventually reaching California—bringing with it the suffrage for white, male farmers. He’s very keen on the virtue of the rural classes. He wants to give a competency of 50 acres to everyone who sets off for the West, in order to guarantee them the vote. And in this sense, he’s progressive in supporting a version of universal suffrage for white men.

This coincides with his brutal policies about Native American removal, which is the centerpiece of his empire of liberty—picked up by Andrew Jackson—and also the idea that slavery should be able to extend into the northwest territories, a position he had rejected in 1784, when he had insisted that slavery be banned in the northwest territories. That failed only because a delegate from Virginia didn’t show up. Jefferson, at the time, said [that] on the fate of millions, that single vote turned.

But then when he got older, he hardened in his attachment to slavery. He totally flip-flopped on the question of the constitutionality of banning slavery in the territories and came to argue that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, adopting a version of the strict construction of the territories clause that he’d originally rejected in the Northwest Ordinance and also rejected in buying Louisiana. So he’s really all over the place in justifying slavery by the end of his life, which makes the idea of an empire of liberty complicated, to say the least.

But that was his vision, and that’s why at Monticello, he oriented the house so that it was facing west and he could look out to the west and imagine the scope of the empire to come.

Jefferson’s Saxon myth

KLUTSEY: Fascinating stuff. You also highlight something that Jefferson calls “the Saxon myth,” the idea that Americans inherited an ancient Anglo-Saxon tradition of liberty and self-government. Why was that story so important to Jefferson, and how much did these founding myths matter in shaping American identity?

ROSEN: He is obsessed with it. So obsessed that it really becomes tedious after a while, because he’s reading Lord Coke and these ancient English analects of common law that even he confesses he can barely understand because they’re so technical. But it’s really a utopian vision of lost liberty.

He gets the idea that at some point, in the mists of the ancient past, before the Norman Conquest, the Saxons and the Celts engaged in self-governing communities through a form of protodemocracies. And in their town meetings they were able—because the communities were so small and all divided into wards—to engage in the first exercises in democratic self-government, before the Norman Conquest imposed feudal entails and other restrictions that he thought were inconsistent with liberty and democracy.

He keeps returning to this myth. It may have satisfied some psychological need in him for a security that he lacked in his own upbringing. He had an ambivalent relationship with his mom and his dad died when he was young, so maybe it gave him a sense of comfort.

But basically, the Saxon myth proved inadequate once King George refused to recognize it. Jefferson believed that the colonists took all of their liberties with them when they emigrated from England, and that the British parliament had no more authority over them than it did over the people of Holland—a position he was not able to persuade anyone but his law tutor, George Wythe, to embrace. So once the king refuses to recognize these ancient common-law liberties that Americans are supposed to have taken with them, then Jefferson broadens his gaze to the universal rights of mankind. And that’s why in the Declaration he says all men, human beings, are created equal. And he roots liberty not in tradition, but in natural law.

And, of course, it’s the natural law tradition that previously excluded groups—from African Americans to women to other immigrants—have invoked to demand their place in the American story, as Martin Luther King did on the Washington Mall, when he invoked the Declaration and said the arc of justice bends upward.

So, from the beginning, Jefferson has two competing notions of liberty, and they’re at war with each other from the beginning.

Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian presidents

KLUTSEY: Now, this may be a bit of an unfair question, but if you look across the 250 years of American history and 46 presidencies, which of the presidents would you say is the most Hamiltonian, and which of the presidents would you say is most Jeffersonian?

ROSEN: Well, that is—it’s not an unfair question, but it’s one that I never thought through. So let me see if I can do it on the spot.

I mean, if you just judge based on a devotion to federal power versus states’ rights, I suppose you’d have to say that FDR is the most Hamiltonian president. Even though he made Jefferson his icon, built the Jefferson Memorial, put Jefferson on the nickel, and died the day before Jefferson’s birthday with an undelivered speech on Jefferson as the prototype of the postwar era.

And the most Jeffersonian president—I suppose that some of the presidents in the early 20th century might count. William Howard Taft, who’s another hero of mine—I wrote a short biography of him—in fact worshiped Hamilton and John Marshall because of their devotion to judicial independence. But he viewed the presidency as a kind of chief magistrate who would carry out Congress’s will, could propose ideas but not really lobby for them. And he also balanced the budget in a way that Jefferson did. So, he was fairly Jeffersonian, but he took a strong view of the executive as chief justice, so he doesn’t quite do it.

Interestingly, the later Gilded Age presidents like Coolidge, who worshiped Hamilton and praised him above all, also were Jeffersonian in their devotion to small government. Ronald Reagan, who said he left the Democratic Party because it had abandoned the limited-government principles of Jefferson, of course expanded executive power, including claims about the unitary executive to vast degrees.

Interestingly, William Jefferson Clinton, who really loved Jefferson and took a bus from Monticello to his inauguration, admired Jefferson and balanced the budget. I think he was the last president who did. So he was pretty true to his namesake. Those are some possibilities. What do you think? Have I missed any?

KLUTSEY: No. The ones that came to mind—I think you already talked about them in terms of the Jeffersonian ones, like Bill Clinton, Coolidge to a certain extent, and then Ronald Reagan as well, to the extent that they focused quite a bit on deregulation. Maybe Carter might be in that camp, potentially? But because of their focus on deregulation, balancing the budget, especially in Bill Clinton’s case. But yes, I thought your answers were great.

Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian legacies in the Supreme Court

KLUTSEY: So the Roberts Court—you made a remarkably prescient observation that Chief Justice John Roberts would likely uphold the Affordable Care Act by channeling John Marshall’s instinct for institutional preservation and judicial restraint. What helped you to see that before many others did?

ROSEN: Well, I wouldn’t call it a prediction or a prophecy. With the arrogance of youth that I was demonstrating in those days as an opinion journalist, I did say that if he took seriously his devotion to John Marshall, his hero, then he would uphold the Affordable Care Act, because Marshall believed in federal power and also in avoiding divisive opinions that would challenge the centerpiece of a president’s domestic agenda, which Marshall avoided doing with Jefferson. And then later, George Will, my friend who I greatly admire, wrote a piece accusing me and some other commentators, including President Obama, of trying to bully Chief Justice Roberts, which of course was silly. We were just writing opinion pieces.

But the significant thing is that, in that crucial moment, Roberts chose to be Marshall rather than Taney, or Justice Bradley, or any of the other justices who struck down totemic super-statutes passed by Congress. He quoted Marshall and Hamilton, and he upheld the Affordable Care Act in a kind of twistification—to use Jefferson’s epithet about Marshall—that his critics thought was completely unprincipled. That jujitsu move, that the Affordable Care Act violated the commerce clause but was a tax, is something that Marshall would have been proud of.

KLUTSEY: And now, going back to what you said earlier, that we should—rather than think of the Supreme Court as the two camps, the originalists and the non-originalists, we should think more in terms of the Hamiltonian versus the Jeffersonian. Is that correct?

ROSEN: Yes, I do think that it’s a significant split. It’s significant that Justice Scalia, the first originalist, called himself a Hamiltonian, said he believed in vigorous federal government, and supported the Chevron opinion, deferring to administrative agencies. And there’s a book about Scalia calling him a Hamiltonian on the court.

He disagreed with Justice Thomas on questions, including the constitutionality of bans on medical marijuana, because Justice Thomas is a Jeffersonian. Just a few weeks ago, he gave a speech praising the Declaration of Independence and natural law. And he takes a much more strict- rather than liberal-constructionist view, and is far less sympathetic to federal power.

On the current court, broadly, you could say that Hamiltonians include Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Barrett, and perhaps Justice Kavanaugh, at least on congressional power. And Jeffersonians include Justices Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas.

Now, it’s not a clean typology, because Democrats tend to be Hamiltonian on executive power, and Jeffersonian on congressional power—at least when the other guy’s in control. And Republicans are the opposite. They tend to be Hamiltonian on executive power, and Jeffersonian on congressional power. [sic] But speaking broadly, there’s certainly a difference in how vigorously the justices are willing to uphold federal power. And I think we see it on the court today.

The inspiration behind “The Pursuit of Liberty”

KLUTSEY: So what inspired you to write the book?

ROSEN: I was the legal affairs editor of The New Republic magazine for a long time—20 years. And at some point then, I came across Herbert Croly’s book, The Promise of the American Life, calling on Theodore Roosevelt to deploy Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends—as we discussed, the Hamiltonian means of strong federal power for the Jeffersonian ends of curbing the trusts and promoting democracy. And I was just intrigued by the phrase.

And then I came to be familiar with the fact that the claim that American history has been a battle between the ideals of Jefferson and Hamilton is probably the oldest thesis in all of American history. I found that John Quincy Adams had made it in his amazing speech about the “Jubilee of the Constitution” on its 50th anniversary, where he said that American history could be traced to the Hamilton-Jefferson debate between federal power and states’ rights. And then I learned that Martin Van Buren, who wrote the first political history of the US, said that the history could be reduced to the Hamilton–Jefferson debate between democracy and rule by elites.

And then, of course, I came across these great books that were really influential in their time, like Claude Bowers’s Jefferson and Hamilton, [which talks about] the battle for democracy versus aristocracy, which just told the story of Hamilton and Jefferson in their own times, but which FDR cited as his inspiration for the New Deal.

So I just wondered whether anyone had taken it up to the present. It seemed like such an obvious topic, the most obvious of all. And to my surprise, no one had. So I thought on the occasion of America 250, it would be useful, interesting, and most of all, that I would learn stuff—which is the way I choose my book topics—to trace the Hamilton–Jefferson battle from the founding into today.

And it’s such an exciting time to be a historian with electronic word searches, because so many of the documents are online. You can just sit on your couch and plug in the words Hamilton and Jefferson to all the most significant debates in American history.

And what surprised me is they’re everywhere. It’s not just hiding in plain sight. Congressmen, presidents, and justices are quoting them by name at all the crucial turning points. And that was important to me, not to vaguely describe a debate as Hamiltonian or Jeffersonian, but to have them quoted in the primary sources as supporting one position or another.

So it proved to be so much richer than I could have even imagined, because at every point up to the present, from Clinton all the way up to President Trump, Americans have been debating Hamilton and Jefferson. The stocks of each of them have gone up and down, depending on pop culture or the needs of the moment. And it’s just a dramatic, and I hope compelling, way of telling the intellectual, social, political and constitutional history of the United States.

A model of civility and resilience

KLUTSEY: That’s excellent. As we wrap up—and speaking of America’s 250th—how should we think about the debate between Hamilton and Jefferson in informing how we consider America’s resilience going forward? By resilience, I mean the ability to adapt, to innovate, to bounce back even stronger in the midst of challenges. And it seems to me that America has been able to do that over the past few centuries. There are probably some interesting lessons for us to learn about this debate or conversation between Jefferson and Hamilton going forward.

ROSEN: Absolutely. First of all, it’s striking how severely we’ve been tested at times in our history, not just during the Civil War but after, with a brutal reaction to Reconstruction, insurrectionist violence from the Whiskey Rebellion to January 6 and beyond. Although, as Richard Hofstadter noted, it’s notable that insurrection has been relatively rare in American history.

But what’s so striking is that despite the violent, at times, and certainly always vigorous clashes between the ideals of Hamilton and Jefferson, Americans have generally been agreed on the ideals of the Declaration that Hamilton and Jefferson were debating, the ideals of the Declaration, the basis of the American creed. Liberty, equality, and government by consent are ideals that both Hamilton and Jefferson accepted, even though they disagreed about how to balance those values.

It’s also very significant that Hamilton and Jefferson themselves are a model for the civil discourse that we need to refer to. They both ended up joining forces in their opposition to Aaron Burr, who they rightly believed was a traitor plotting a secessionist movement in Spanish Louisiana and planning to set himself up as a dictator of Mexico. Hamilton said, “If we have an embryo Caesar, tis Burr.” And he supported Jefferson over Burr in the election of 1800, because although he didn’t like Jefferson, he thought Burr was a traitor and Jefferson was a patriot.

And Jefferson reciprocated by placing a bust of Hamilton next to his own in the central entrance hall of Monticello, which you can see if you go there today. And when Jefferson would pass the bust, as he was old, he would smile faintly and say, “Opposed in life as in death.” And for Jefferson, Hamilton was not a hated enemy to be opposed, but a respected opponent to be engaged with. And as we think about resilience and civility on the occasion of America 250, that’s exactly the spirit that we’ve got to get back to today.

KLUTSEY: That’s excellent. Well, Jeff Rosen, thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. And this is a fantastic book: The Pursuit of Liberty. Really wonderful book. Learned a lot from it. Thank you very much, Jeff.

ROSEN: Thanks for reading it so closely, and congrats again on this great new podcast.

KLUTSEY: Thank you.