Governor Mitch Daniels and Katherine Mangu-Ward, Editor in Chief of Reason Magazine, discuss why it’s so hard for third parties to gain ground in American politics, whether not voting is a responsible choice, the role of technology in education, and the place of traditional and new media in the modern political landscape.
Governor Mitch Daniels and Katherine Mangu-Ward, Editor in Chief of Reason Magazine, discuss why it’s so hard for third parties to gain ground in American politics, whether not voting is a responsible choice, the role of technology in education, and the place of traditional and new media in the modern political landscape.
Intro (00:02):
Welcome to The Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund, hosted by Mitch Daniels.
Mitch Daniels (00:16):
Greetings and welcome to this installment of Liberty Fund's Future of Liberty podcast. We are so fortunate to have with us today Katherine Mangu-Ward, who is the Editor-in-Chief, at Reason Magazine.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (00:31):
That's right.
Mitch Daniels (00:32):
For some of us, our favorite publication. Welcome and thanks for being with us.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (00:38):
I'm delighted to be here.
Mitch Daniels (00:39):
So let me start by adapting the old barstool line, what's a nice libertarian girl like you doing living in Washington, D.C.?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (00:48):
It's a fair question, but my best go-to answer has two parts. The first is I grew up in the DC area, so it's home for me. I'm a beltway baby and it's hard to escape once you're inside the vortex. But my other answer is somebody's got to keep an eye on those guys. So, many years ago, Reason Magazine, which was founded in 1968, actually used to run ads that said, "We're a political magazine that's not based in Washington, D.C." It used to be a selling point. But so much of what we cover happens there, that we really do need reporters on the ground, on the hill, kind of keeping an eye on congress, on the president, on the vast and sprawling administrative state.
Mitch Daniels (01:34):
I guess that's an acceptable excuse.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (01:38):
In, but maybe not of the city. How's that?
Mitch Daniels (01:40):
We'll settle for that. And now that I know you actually have roots there to the extent anyone ever can, we'll give you a pass.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (01:47):
A local girl.
Mitch Daniels (01:48):
All right. Despite your obvious youth, you've been at Reason quite a long time now. And you've seen a lot of changes. Some of us still like to read magazines, even occasionally, the kind you can hold in your hand. How many people are doing that? And is the written word still the primary currency in the world of ideas in which you are a leader?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (02:19):
One thing that always astonishes me is that even in 2024, people who have not heard of Reason or are coming across it for the first time, a question that they ask is, "Well, is it a real magazine?" By which they mean, do we murder trees and print it on there and mail it out to people, right? And I think that there is something about that that people find to be satisfying and also kind of validating. If you're going to bother to print a magazine, you must be really serious about what you're putting in there. We stopped doing a lot of our direct mail or other advertising for the print magazine many years ago, and it was a surprise to us that actually our subscription numbers keep climbing. So there really are people who seek out and want a print magazine to read and leave on their coffee table and give to their friends.
Mitch Daniels (03:10):
They want something to tear things out.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (03:11):
Yes.
Mitch Daniels (03:12):
You can scribble on it.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (03:14):
Maybe fold it up, put it in an envelope, mail it off to an unsuspecting victim. That's for sure still a thing that we hear about. So yeah, I actually think the era of print magazines is not over. And oddly, there is a growing audience for people who I think want to get off their phones and get off their screens, but still want to consume something meaningful about the news. Of course, that's a smaller part of what we do now. When I was an intern at Reason in the summer of 2000, the website did exist, but the magazine was the primary product and we still did our proofing by fax. So it's very, very different now.
Mitch Daniels (03:53):
What's a fax?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (03:56):
Yeah. I'll teach the children about facsimile machines on this podcast. It'll be great.
Mitch Daniels (04:01):
Define for the audience the difference between a capital L Libertarian and a small l libertarian.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (04:08):
Right. So Reason is a libertarian magazine, but we say that we are small l libertarian, and that is to kind of center the word around the philosophy of libertarianism. Our motto is, “Free Minds and Free Markets” and that's how we think about what libertarianism means. Capital L Libertarian, we use and most people use to refer to the Libertarian Party, which is a very different entity. Small l libertarianism, I think, is bigger and more important in many ways than capital L Libertarianism.
(04:45):
And one thing that we think a lot about at Reason is how to push the boundaries of small l libertarianism. So it's about constraining the state. It's about limiting the government. It's about limiting the size and scope of government, not just the dollars spent. But it's also maybe a way of thinking about what we owe to each other and what it means to be an individual in a society with a state. We do a lot of internal debate and discussion about what it means to be a small l libertarian. There's not one answer, but the Libertarian Party, capital L Libertarians, is a distinct phenomenon.
Mitch Daniels (05:27):
Yeah, it is. Some of us have been watching and wondering whether at some point they could become a more material factor in our politics. Hasn't happened. But pursue that a little further. Talk about why they haven't grown, especially with the dissatisfaction now, the record dissatisfaction about the two established parties. They've just nominated, as we're sitting here today, their next presidential candidate. What do you think their prospects are? Any opportunity for growth there or will small l libertarianism have to find other vehicles?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (06:11):
I would certainly love to live in a country where there was a robust third party that had libertarian leanings. I don't think that's a crazy idea. I think libertarianism is very American. I think there are a lot of people in this country who would identify with some of the tenets of libertarianism, and those people are, like many other Americans, maybe not thrilled about the candidates that are on offer right now from the two major parties.
(06:41):
I think the Libertarian Party has a couple of things working against it. One is that the deck is actually stacked, right? So our electoral system is jointly owned by the two major parties and they have all kinds of tools and tricks to keep third parties out, not just libertarians, but Green Party, Reform Party, independent candidates. The most powerful of which is excluding them from the debate stage. For many Americans, their first kind of moment when they really start to think meaningfully about who they might vote for is that moment when they see the two guys shouting at each other from behind podiums. And the debates actually up until this cycle have been totally locked down by a bipartisan debate commission that is not interested in opening up to third parties.
(07:32):
Ballot access is another really big issue. It's quite hard to get on the ballot if your party hasn't been on the ballot in past elections. One of the Libertarian Party's biggest wins has been decades of working on getting ballot access, so you will see Libertarian Party candidates on most ballots, but it's a struggle and they have to kind of fight to keep their heads above water every single cycle.
Mitch Daniels (07:55):
Is it fair to say that another impediment to their growth has been a lack of coherence in what they stand for or what they appear to stand for, and some inconsistency from election year to election year?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (08:12):
So I do think that's true of the Libertarian Party, but I also think it's just as true of the major parties. I mean, so many of the critiques that you can level against the Libertarian Party, the slightest bit of self-awareness on the part of a hardcore Democrat or a hardcore Republican, they're going to say, "Oh, yeah, actually our party has that problem, too. Our party has super fierce internecine warfare over very small procedural issues. Our party has a tendency to validate after the fact," whatever the kind of presidential nominee says. Certainly, we're seeing that on display in both of the mainstream parties right now in particular. But libertarians are kind of, this is sort of an old joke, if you put two libertarians on a desert island, there's going to be three kinds of libertarianism immediately, right? So there really is in libertarianism, this streak for wanting to figure things out for yourself and kind of having your own variant of the philosophy, and the Libertarian Party can suffer from that as well.
Mitch Daniels (09:18):
I like contrarians and you certainly have more than one view that qualifies, but here's one that maybe you'd like to explain to the viewers. You think we should all stay home and not bother voting?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (09:33):
I do. This is the best way to get in a fight at a dinner party or maybe on a podcast, so we'll see how it goes. I wrote a piece many years ago, a cover story for Reason on this topic. I am a non-voter. I don't vote. And I think that in general, people really overvalue voting as a civic act. So the first thing I would say is, I'm a political journalist. Obviously, I think participating in the political process is really important. You should care about who governs you. But people kind of have this idea that they can just go and pull the lever, and they've done their civic duty. And I think, first of all, there have been vanishingly few elections that were decided by one vote. There's just a mathematical issue here. You're not the guy that's going to decide the election.
(10:26):
But then there's also a kind of moral question, which is, how do I interact with a system that I think is fundamentally unjust or produces bad outcomes? And I think now more than ever, no matter who wins, I think it's going to be bad. And I think you can say, "Well, it's not your fault if the guy you voted for loses." But we kind of do this thing where we both say, "If you don't vote, you can't complain," and also, "Well, by voting, you ratified the result. You participated in the system and justified it." And so there's this feeling of, we're kind of trapped.
(11:05):
And I will say, it is our God-given right as Americans to complain. That is the most fundamental right that Americans have. It is not subordinate to voting. I will complain until my dying day, but I will not vote. And I think that it's important to disaggregate those things. Those rights come from different places and those privileges require different things from us. People can vote if they feel like it's fun, but I would just like for them to understand what it's really doing and also what kind of system they might be complicit in.
Mitch Daniels (11:39):
My last contact with Immanuel Kant was about the second semester of freshman year, but if we universalized your behavior, we'd have an interesting situation. Maybe that's the answer.
(11:51):
Nobody gets elected.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (11:52):
I’m not a Kantian, and that’s one reason why. I actually think the idea of universalizing behavior as a way to arrive at moral principles doesn’t always work. But as I say in that article, and I do believe this, I can write a universal principle that accommodates this view. The principle is something like: if your vote will influence the outcome of an election, it is imperative that you vote; otherwise, feel free to skip it. If I’m voting in a PTA election and there are only two of us there, I’ll vote. But I think there’s a kind of collective delusion that we have real power through our individual votes. There are constant get out to vote campaigns, and they may mobilize lower information voters, people motivated by something other than a deep understanding of the issues or party positions. Encouraging that, I think, may not be the path to civic health.
(12:56):
I think the closest analogy actually is probably when you go to a sports ball game of your choice, people feel like voting is being on the team, but voting is being in the crowd, right? You're cheering. You're happy to be there, you want your guys to win, but actually going to the game does not influence the outcome of the game. And I think if people understood that better, you can still go to the game, but you should not be confused about whether you're on the team.
Mitch Daniels (13:26):
I think you can count on continued fights at the future cocktail party.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (13:30):
I do think so. I'm happy to fight. I love to fight. I think that's one of the great things about the United States is we have a culture of scrapping it out on political disagreements.
Mitch Daniels (13:41):
Well, on that subject, you point out, as many have, the polarization of our country. But the relatively small percentages who adhere to the two edges, you express the idea that hope is in the middle. Many have said this, but what's the mechanism for that middle mobilizing or at least expressing itself in a way that begins to have more effect on events?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (14:17):
It's tricky, right? Because on the one hand, I do think our politics are increasingly dominated by people who are extremely polarized, both in terms of substance, but more importantly, affective polarization, right? So this idea that the other side is evil or will destroy the country, or I think most importantly, the idea that the other guy broke the rules first and now we can break the rules, too. I think that kind of schoolyard tit-for-tat thinking is so dominant and so dangerous. Because, two wrongs don't make a right, as we also learn in the schoolyard it's very hard to trace who the original bad actor was.
(15:07):
But I used to say that libertarianism was a radical philosophy, and I still do think it has radical intent, but more and more, I don't see libertarianism as radical, I see it as actually being the real moderate philosophy. That is to say, given that we can't agree, could we try kind of leaving each other alone a little bit? Could we try doing less, not more, to get involved in each other's lives? Again, given that we have really demonstrated quite clearly that we can't agree. When we do agree, it's also sometimes not great. So there's that piece as well. But I think that the notion of moderation is sometimes taken as a kind of milk toast or mealy mouth but maybe moderation is something like a ceasefire or a detente or kind of toleration for each other.
Mitch Daniels (16:03):
Right. There is a certain asymmetry though when one side, which may assert that the other side broke a rule first, I want to come back to that in a second, but when one side is not only happy, but feels fully justified in using the coercive power of the state or maybe other institutions to order the world in the way it sees as just. And the other team is live and let live.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (16:39):
I'm not sure which teams you're describing as which anymore. I mean, I would have said at one time that maybe at least Republicans paid more lip service to the idea of live and let live, and the left was a little more authoritarian, but more and more, I hear people on the right say, "You know what? We tried toleration. We tried to live and let live. And those Commies," lefties, progressives, whatever, "They came after us and so now we got to do the same." And you hear that on everything from trade policy, "Well, China started it, so now we got to fight fire with fire."
(17:18):
You hear it on kind of partisan warfare, but also just kind of everyday domestic policy as well, the idea that, we would love to have free speech, but we're going to need to pass a law coercing the social media companies. And then on the left, they have one proposal and on the right, they have the other proposal, but they're both using the power of the state to try and coerce private businesses to help their side win, or would if they could get away with it.
Mitch Daniels (17:50):
Today, one side's got their hands on the levers and not just the state.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (17:54):
I do think one thing we learned coming out of the COVID pandemic was that social media companies both cooperated with and were coerced by, in a kind of reciprocal way that’s hard to disentangle, the public health establishment. The Twitter Files, and reporting by Reason, obtained documents showing a similar phenomenon at Facebook. You saw people within the bureaucracies of these social media companies sometimes reaching out and asking to be told what to do, but also actors from the state, from the CDC, the FDA, the State Department, and other agencies reaching out and essentially saying, “That’s a nice social media company you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it, if you were accused of disseminating misinformation.”
(18:51):
And so I do think my bias as a libertarian is to kind of ask the question, where is the state exerting power, even if it is subtle power, even if it is implied power? And it's true often that there are going to be eager collaborators. That's always the case in authoritarian regimes. But I still think in the end, the real villain isn't the guy at Twitter who happens to be a lefty. The real villain is the guy at the CDC putting the pressure on the guy at Twitter.
Mitch Daniels (19:25):
Maybe the greater villain. But did you see any evidence of resentment, resistance, anybody taking offense among the social media actors?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (19:39):
Oh, yeah.
Mitch Daniels (19:39):
Was it?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (19:40):
I think so. In the email chains and direct message threads that came out, there were absolutely people in other parts of the conversations saying, “Hey, is this legal?” “Hey, is this wise?” “Hey, this doesn’t comport with our standards.” That aspect was, I think, underappreciated. It was often the case that there was some existing moderation policy, and then someone, internally or externally, would say, “Okay, we’ve got to block this person,” and someone else in the chain would ask, “On what grounds?”
(20:11):
And we also did see people from the House of Representatives and the senate reaching out and saying, "You don't have to follow these rules." And some unexpected people like Ocana and others saying, "This is inconsistent with our principles of free speech and it's not going to end well." So I actually do think, not to be like Mr. Rogers about it, but you can look for the helpers, you can look for people who are trying to do the right thing, and they're there.
Mitch Daniels (20:41):
Good to know. There has been, and I don’t think “scandal” is too strong a word, a series of scandalous disclosures confirming what many people suspected all along: that the government was knowingly duplicitous about some of the mandates and its interpretations of the facts and the science at the time. There has been a string of disclosures and even confessions about what was and was not known regarding the origins of the virus, the effectiveness of masks, and whether the Great Barrington Declaration’s recommendations were at least legitimate and worthy of discussion. Is anything going to come of that, or will it simply evaporate?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (21:40):
Gosh, I'm so torn, because on the one hand, I would just love to think that maybe somewhere in the system, someone would acquire a little bit of humility. They really did screw up quite badly on the origins hypothesis. And so part of me thinks like, "Well, massive public embarrassment is a good teacher." On the other hand, this is hardly the first time that something like this has happened. Reason recently ran a piece by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky about some of these new disclosures and what folks at the NIH knew and when they knew it. The theories about gain of function research and what was going on in Wuhan.
(22:24):
And this kind of gets back to first principles for me, but I really think that the answer fundamentally has to be reducing the power of these government entities, because as long as they have the power, they'll abuse it. And so the question is, well, why was the NIH making these decisions in an unaccountable way to fund this research? Why were they looping around and working around established safeguards to prevent this kind of thing? We actually have Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who was one of the authors of the Barrington Declaration, he's reviewing Fauci's memoir for us.
Mitch Daniels (23:03):
Well, that'd be a good read.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (23:03):
I do think we need to kind of not only push back in real time, we also need to hold people accountable after the fact when we have more information. I think this is the role of the press, right? We do the Freedom of Information Act requests. We take the people who knew what was going on and we say, "We're not going to just all pretend this didn't happen." But in the end, I think this is why you need to defund these agencies. You have to reduce their scope. You have to reduce the amount of space that they're given by legislators to make decisions on their own. Congress has a job and for many, many years it's chosen not to do it. They could be constraining all of these types of things, and they're choosing not to because it's a hard fight.
Mitch Daniels (23:57):
Those of us who would like to believe that these gross errors and derelictions that we're talking about were either the result of honest misjudgments or biases that people acted out to a point would welcome the humility you talked about and some confessions, because absent that, it's only natural for people to come to more sinister conclusions, conspiracies and all that.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (24:34):
Yes. I do think the public choice literature has a lot to say about this. There are many experts in this area, so I’m going to offer a very rough paraphrase: government actors who do bad things don’t have to be bad people. One of the most important insights is that public servants face incentives to grow their agencies, keep their activities secret, gather as much funding and influence as they can, and dodge oversight. These dynamics are built into the system. You can put decent people into these jobs and still end up with terrible outcomes. I think much of what happened during COVID is best explained in that way, rather than by appealing to a sinister conspiracy or supervillain narrative. Sometimes everyone is trying to do their best, but they are responding to incentives that produce disastrous results. That is why we should be wary of empowering so few people to make such sweeping decisions for the rest of us.
Mitch Daniels (25:44):
Yeah. That's what I was really getting at, having spent some time in public life, I've always been mystified how hard the word “oops” is for people.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (25:57):
Not just in the public sphere. I'm sorry to say.
Mitch Daniels (25:59):
Well, that’s true, but it matters more in cases where people are holding a public trust, acting on behalf of others, and spending money confiscated through taxation. My reading and experience suggest that the public is more understanding than that. What is harder for people to accept is when officials dissemble and refuse to admit obvious errors. And when the press fails to serve its historic function of holding them accountable and correcting the record, it only fuels the perception that something worse is going on.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (26:45):
I think that's right. And I think this is something we see as our role at Reason. We wear our ideological biases on our sleeves. We say, "We're libertarian. This is what we're doing, we're looking for analysis and stories to tell you about the world, questions to investigate and report on that are congruent with a libertarian worldview." But to me, what that means is we're going to think to look at places other people might not think to look. And I think there still are lots of rewards for genuine holding power accountable style journalism. Unfortunately, there are also lots of rewards for sucking up to power journalism, and you see a lot of that, particularly at our major papers.
Mitch Daniels (27:28):
Yeah. You've mentioned in a couple contexts, the new technologies which are rushing on upon us faster than some of us can keep track of. From the very beginning, the dawn of the information age, people have wondered and speculated whether these magnificent innovations would enhance freedom and enable freedom, or become the instruments of oppressing it. Where do you think we are and which is the greater likelihood?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (28:05):
So I think ultimately technology is a human thing, and so it has all the attributes that humans have, including that it is both freedom enhancing and also can empower instruments of control. So I would generally describe myself as a kind of techno optimist. I think in general, the story of the last 200 years, let's say, is a story of international trade in not only goods and ideas, but especially the place that goods and ideas come together, which is technology, to make people's lives better. And we're talking about dramatic reversals in literacy and access to clean water, education for everyone, but especially for women. Just base what kind of income per capita different nations have. And I think all of that is genuinely attributable to technological innovation in some sense.
(29:14):
I think that sometimes the technologies with the greatest influence are not ones we typically think of as technology. Governance structures can be technologies in that sense. The idea of rights, for example, functions as a kind of tool for building institutions and shaping social order. On a more conventional definition, though, in my industry we are able to communicate with more people, and more people are able to communicate with one another, than ever before. I have to believe that this is, on balance, a win for freedom. Yes, people often say completely foolish things to one another, but they have always done that. The difference is that they used to do it on a much smaller scale.
(29:59):
And sometimes people hear something that's really life changing. Sometimes people learn something they didn't know before. Sometimes people see something from a new perspective. And I think communication technology in particular, has its downsides, but ultimately, is a freedom promoting thing. Of course, if you do this all in public and you do it all on the record, it's also super convenient for governments who might want to crack down on certain types of speech.
Mitch Daniels (30:24):
So what should we make of the, now, not just suggestions, but actual moves toward imposing social media limitations on young people?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (30:35):
So I am fundamentally opposed. And I know that in some ways that's a lonely position, because almost everyone on both the left and the right now says some version of, "Hasn't this gone too far? Can't we make rules? Can't we make laws?" So I would say two things. One is the government's pretty bad at anything it tries to do. And so I think we should assume that especially when it comes to technology, they're going to screw it up. Not that there’s a perfect regulation that could exist, but the odds that my buddies in Washington, D.C. are going to get that exactly right are so low. And in the meantime, they may wind up really messing up important technology in ways that are hard to see in advance.
(31:22):
But I think the other piece of it is, I'm old enough to remember when Republicans in particular used to talk about how parents are responsible for their children. So I often think, what about the children? We have to protect the children. Social media is a case where parenting very much can be the remedy. And I think it's appropriate to say the right decision making level for whether your kids should be on social media is your household, not Washington, D.C.
Mitch Daniels (31:53):
Differentiated from alcohol, drugs, driving, a number of things we place age limits on. Is this materially different?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (32:05):
I think it's materially different for a couple of reasons. One is it's almost impossible to avoid quite dramatic knock-on effects for adults if we try to impose these age limits for kids. So for example, in several states, the way that they're trying to enforce these age limits that have already gone into effect is you have to upload your driver's license to prove your age. Reasonable enough, that's what we do if you want to buy beer. But to me, it's a different thing to show a liquor store clerk my driver's license versus to give my driver's license and then presumably attach everything that I do on TikTok, say, to my real identity and also give that information to a government. That seems like a recipe for a disaster.
(32:54):
So I do think, so often it is the case, that restrictions that are meant to protect children are actually the thin end of the wedge to restrict adult choice and adult behavior, and I want to be vigilant about that. Reason recently did a big project in collaboration with Bellwether, the education research folks over there who brought together a huge dataset about the cutoffs for every age in every state for different activities. So when can you work? When can you vape? When can you get birth control? When can you get married? When can you drive a tractor? And one thing that was really interesting to me is how totally incoherent it was. Every state was different. They were different in different patterns.
Mitch Daniels (33:40):
Well, we like states to be different, don't we?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (33:42):
And we do. In theory, this is a kind of laboratory-of-democracy situation. In practice, though, it seems that as a nation, and even within individual states, we don’t have a clear idea of when people become adults and when they should have responsibility over their own lives. I worry that we are increasingly infantilizing teenagers in particular. I want young people to take responsibility for themselves and perhaps grow up a little faster than they have in this age of helicopter parenting. So I do want kids to have freedom where it’s appropriate, and I think it’s the parents’ job to decide when that is.
Mitch Daniels (34:18):
So one last question about where appropriate. What about leaving them legal, but banning them in schools where there is evidence that they get in the way of the educational process?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (34:28):
Yeah, I think that's totally reasonable. But I would say this is where a little of my maybe more radical libertarianism comes out. You know what makes this decision really easy? If there are no public schools. Right? If this is something where you're sending your kid to a school of choice and you can opt into a policy, right? So I think it's one thing if you say, okay, every school child in Montana, no phones, no social media. Well, there might be people who disagree. There might be people who want something different for their kids. It's a little too one-size-fits-all for my taste. I still think it's permissible. Kids do have more restrictions on their freedom within a public school, though they do have free speech rights within a public school, as the Supreme Court has established. And so I think there are some questions there. But I would love to see a world where there's true school choice. Heavily voucherized if you want to still involve state funding or just private schools. And in that case, parents could choose for their kids how much access they have.
Mitch Daniels (35:31):
Well, welcome to Indiana, where we've had total school choice.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (35:34):
I know. I'm happy to be here.
Mitch Daniels (35:36):
Among public schools, charter schools and a private voucher system for essentially everyone now for quite a long time.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (35:44):
So I'd like to see schools be able to experiment the way they have with so many other things here.
Mitch Daniels (35:49):
One last school question. You've written, or at least a time ago, you wrote very provingly of online education, even in the younger ages. Now we had a very large clinical trial of this.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (36:01):
We did.
Mitch Daniels (36:02):
Did we learn anything that either reinforced your view or modified it?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (36:08):
Yes. I think one of the things we learned during COVID, and I experienced this firsthand as a parent of young children, is that in many cases our kids’ in person education was not very good. So many parents suddenly had a window into what their children were doing during the day. It was the Zoom version, and it was often hastily put together, especially at first, but many parents found themselves thinking, “Oh my God, is this what school is like? Is this what kids are doing all day?” And they were deeply unhappy with what they saw.
(36:45):
I don’t think the problem is the computers. I think the problem is the schools. I think the problem is the teachers’ unions and the culture war battles over curriculum. During COVID, my kids went from attending public school to attending a microschool, a private school. I’m fortunate to have a school choice. Many families in Indiana do, though not everyone does. Now my kids attend Acton Academies, two different Acton modeled schools. They use online tools all the time. They learn math from Khan Academy, with Sal Khan teaching over the internet. But they do it within the context of a school built on a human scale, in a way that I think makes much more sense.
Mitch Daniels (37:34):
And there is some social interaction as part of it.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (37:37):
Sure. And I mean, I don't think anybody is saying the pure perfect utopia would be one where no one ever leaves their basement. But I do think we so often are comparing the way that online learning plays out in real life to some kind of imagined ideal of in-person universal public schooling, and that's the wrong comparison.
Mitch Daniels (37:58):
Right.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (37:59):
So I remain bullish on online education and certainly feel like it's working for my kids.
Mitch Daniels (38:06):
There've been a number of reported public opinion surveys among younger people that suggest a very different view of this country, of its institutions, of free minds and free markets than every other generation, including the ones just adjacent. Plainly, an ignorance of traditions and history and a probably related hostility, at least expressed, capitalism, free speech, and so forth. How concerned are you or aren't you? Is this something they'll learn and grow their way out of, or will America look very different when they're in charge?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (38:51):
I’m sure America will look very different when they’re in charge, because it always does. Every generation changes things. I can’t quite jump on the “kids these days are bad” bandwagon, even though I’ve certainly seen evidence that gives people pause. I think a couple of things are going on. First, if there’s anything we’ve learned since at least 2016, and probably earlier, it’s that polls are difficult to interpret. It’s not clear that when young people say, “We live in late stage capitalism and it’s bad,” they have a concrete sense of what that means, or even that they firmly believe it, as opposed to simply repeating what they hear from their peers.
(39:40):
We also do see this problem with adults. Yeah, I've been very struck recently by the way in which partisan views on both trade and immigration just swap depending on who's in power and what they're doing. It suggests that lots of Americans just don't actually have deeply held views framed in ideological terms or in policy terms. And I actually think that's a good thing. I think frankly, it's a better country if people don't think and talk as much about electoral politics. Now, that's different from big ideas and that's different from any kind of civic engagement. But when kids say, "I'm a socialist," what does that mean? I don't think they know. I do think the kind of joys and conveniences and freedoms afforded by a capitalist society with a robust liberal tradition are pretty great in real time. And I think people will be very hesitant to give them up, even as much as they kind of want to fight it out on the partisan level.
(40:45):
So I think it’s going to be okay. We have a very deep well to draw on in the United States. Educational options for kids are changing radically right now. Not every student will leave school understanding why capitalism is great, but more of them will have the opportunity to encounter and consider those ideas in the coming years. I do think the tide can turn.
Mitch Daniels (41:10):
I think we have to take a charitable view of many young people today, or at least I do. For one thing, they haven’t seen a very encouraging picture. Their exposure to our market system may have included a few good years, but also some very bad ones during the period when they were old enough to pay attention. Our political system, too, has been less attractive and less uplifting than it has been for much of American history. We’ve had difficult moments before, but this is not one of our better periods. On top of that, many students have received a miseducation, or at least an education that lacks perspective on the issues we’ve been discussing. Too often, schools have not given young people a broader historical or economic context. That gives me some hope that experience, or learning later in life, may moderate some of these views.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (42:11):
I do also think real life is different from school. And I actually was talking to some education reform folks who said they hate that expression. They hate people contrasting school and real life. School is real life for these kids, and that's true. But there's nothing like getting your first paycheck and having the tax bite out of it to just move everybody a couple ticks toward the libertarian side of the spectrum, even if only in that moment of outrage.
Mitch Daniels (42:37):
There's the kid I read about a long time ago, the apocryphal probably said, "Who is this FICA guy and why did he take so much of my money?"
Katherine Mangu-Ward (42:45):
Absolutely. And I think that that's real. I think that there is this kind of experience, maybe people are skeptical of the capitalist system as they understand it, but they're also skeptical of the state. And the worst equilibrium is one that's very low trust, where people sort of say, "Capitalism is bad, the state is bad, everything's bad," and they become kind of nihilistic. But I also think there's a more optimistic view, which is that it balances. Yes, maybe capitalism isn't perfect, but on the other hand, they just took a third of my paycheck and spent it on what? Aid to foreign nations that I don't approve of their conduct or enforcing book bans in Florida, or whatever it is that makes these kids mad. The police that are beating people in the streets, you can take kind of a lefty perspective, like they're taking my tax money and they're doing horrible things with it, and I think that that does pull people back from this kind of anti-status quo radicalism.
Mitch Daniels (43:49):
So let's finish. I'm going to give you an invitation to make us all feel better here at the end. Look out 20, 30 years, let's say mid-century. Is America a freer nation than today or less so?
Katherine Mangu-Ward (44:07):
I think it's freer, and I think there are a couple reasons why. One is technology. I think that as long as the world outside of government is growing faster than the state, that life gets better. And so I think that there are days when it feels like maybe the growth of government is overtaking the private sector, but for the most part, that's not the case. The government does get bigger, but people are just living their lives and doing interesting things in the market and as artists and as engineers, they are making the world freer and better. They're giving people more choices and more ways to collaborate and interact and speak to each other. As long as that continues, then I think the world keeps getting better. And so far that is where we are.
Mitch Daniels (45:00):
Well, Katherine Mangu-Ward, one of the reasons I'm inclined to optimism is that you and Reason Magazine are, they're on the ram parts looking for things others haven't looked for or found yet. Please keep doing that.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (45:14):
Yes, sir.
Mitch Daniels (45:15):
And I think there's an excellent chance that better tomorrow does arrive. Thanks for being with us.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (45:21):
Thank you so much for having me.
Outro (45:22):
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