Governor Mitch Daniels and Reason magazine Senior Editor Stephanie Slade consider the changing factions of the American political landscape, the history and future of fusionism, and how college students became such big fans of big government. They also consider the contrast between the hopelessness of a static society and the hope and fears of a dynamic one and give us some reasons to be hopeful for the future of liberty.
Governor Mitch Daniels and Reason magazine Senior Editor Stephanie Slade consider the changing factions of the American political landscape, the history and future of fusionism, and how college students became such big fans of big government. They also consider the contrast between the hopelessness of a static society and the hope and fears of a dynamic one and give us some reasons to be hopeful for the future of liberty.
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 the latest edition of Liberty Fund's Future of Liberty podcast. We are very delighted today to have with us Stephanie Slade, senior editor at Reason Magazine, someone a lot of us have been reading for a very long time, despite her youth. Stephanie, thanks so much for making time for us.
Stephanie Slade (00:37):
Thank you so much for having me.
Mitch Daniels (00:39):
You have a very interesting history that brought you to this point. You have been at Reason a long time. Although, I was interested to notice that having been promoted to this number two editorial job, you gave it up. Apparently you wanted to spend more time writing and illuminating the rest of us. Was that your reason?
Stephanie Slade (01:02):
Yes it was. During my first seven and a half years at Reason, I was first deputy managing editor under Katherine Mangu-Ward and then managing editor when she became editor-in-chief. It was a lot of fun to decide what was going to go into the print magazine each month and to seek out interesting people and try to convince them to write for us and then to track them down and convince them that they should actually turn in the thing they promised to write for us. And I really enjoyed that very, very much, but it made it hard to find time to do my own writing.
(01:32):
After about eight years in those two roles, I asked Katherine if I could have permission to step out of the managing editor job and into a generic senior editor job, which basically means I'm mostly a writer. I do a little bit of editing, but mostly I get to do my own writing, which I'm very excited about.
Mitch Daniels (01:50):
Well, whoever is making the trains run is still doing a good job. Those of us on the consuming end are awfully happy that we get to see, hear, and read more of you.
Stephanie Slade (02:01):
Thank you.
Mitch Daniels (02:01):
So, good choice. One other thing before we get to the issues of the day: at some point, right before Reason, I gather you were in the public opinion polling business, or survey research. Tell us just a little bit about that. In the intervening years, that industry has really been turned upside down, in terms of its techniques and the difficulty of reaching people and accurately figuring out what the public is thinking. What do you have to say about that?
Stephanie Slade (02:33):
Yes, it has changed so much. I've been out of that world now for about 10 years, and it was already a challenging task to try to capture the opinions of the public. But back in my day, you could still imagine calling somebody on a landline and expecting that they would answer the phone, and that you could keep them on that phone for 22 minutes and it was considered an acceptable amount of time for a length of a survey that you would administer.
(02:58):
And there was more, at least at that point response rates had already been coming down for years, but they were still, maybe, in the low-double digits. None of that is true anymore. Nobody answers their landline phones. Many people don't have landline phones. People are very suspicious or skeptical of a call to their cell phone that they don't know where it came from, so they don't want to necessarily answer. Very few people want to stay on the phone with a stranger for 20 minutes or more, and so the industry has had to really think hard about what to do in the face of all these challenges.
(03:29):
And I’m no longer in that world, so I haven’t actually been on the front lines seeing how they’ve been trying to be creative in solving that problem. I know they’ve introduced all kinds of modeling and very statistically sophisticated techniques to try to say, ‘Okay, how can we…’ and to make sense of the responses and have them reflect reality.
(03:56):
I think that I am not ready to write off the whole industry and say you can't believe anything that you read or anything that they tell you, but I do counsel my colleagues at Reason, for example, when they're writing about poll results to bring a very healthy dose of skepticism to it.
Mitch Daniels (04:10):
Skepticism is a very healthy instinct, whether we’re talking about polling or our government and its operations. You’ve written some very interesting things about what I’d call a more recent phenomenon: the populist Right. It’s sometimes said, and it seems to me, that we’ve seen a rather rapid transformation, really an inversion of the parties. Democrats are now the party of the rich and the well-educated, while Republicans are much more the party of what we usually call the working class. To me, it’s the biggest transformation, maybe since the South changed sides some 50 years ago. What should we make of the so-called big-government Right? Where did it come from, and where might it take us?
Stephanie Slade (05:05):
I think there are actually a couple of different things going on here. One is this idea of a realignment on class or educational grounds, and I think there is quite a lot of evidence that this is happening. So it used to be that when people thought about the Republican Party, they thought of country club Republicans, they thought about business owners, they thought about wealthier and highly educated constituencies. And when they thought about Democrats, they thought about blue collar workers, they thought about labor union members, people maybe who didn't go on, maybe they completed their high school diploma, but they didn't go on to college.
(05:35):
And that has very much changed. I mean, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that if you have a college degree, you are much more likely to vote Democrat today. And if you didn't go to college or if you are a blue collar worker, you're much more likely than you used to be to be a Republican. So there are definitely changes afoot.
(05:51):
The second question, and maybe the more interesting one substantively, is what does that mean for where the parties come down on different policy issues? Does the Republican Party, as a result of these changes, need to abandon its commitment to free markets, free trade, and become the party of big government? Some people think, yes. Some people are arguing, yes, this is the future of the Republican Party, let's get behind industrial policy and tariffs and so on and so forth.
(06:17):
I’m more skeptical of that, but I do acknowledge that there are now two sides to this debate. Whereas once upon a time, if you were a Republican, you probably believed in individual liberty, limited government, and free markets. Nowadays, there is what I often refer to as the ‘liberalism schism’ that’s opened up and by that I mean classical liberalism. On one side, you have limited government; on the other, big government, robust government, muscular government. And now you have conservatives in that muscular-government camp who are saying, ‘Forget your limited government. Forget your individual liberty. We want strong leaders who are willing to use the power of the state to enact our beliefs into law.’ So this is a real change.
(06:58):
I'm not convinced that that's necessarily the future. I'm very hopeful. I think that this is still very much an open debate. I'm hopeful that that is not going to be the future, but I think there are two camps that are battling it out right now in the marketplace of ideas.
Mitch Daniels (07:11):
Well, let me ask you about what I’d say is maybe an extreme version of the phenomenon you just described. There are some folks you've written about and interviewed who not only want a more active government to promote economic interests they think have been threatened or damaged by unfettered markets, but also to shape cultural norms, behaviors, and conduct. You’ve quoted one person who said, ‘We need the government to enforce our order and orthodoxy.’ Is there anything remotely practical about that, even if it were a good idea?
Stephanie Slade (08:07):
There are those who believe that this is the future, that a realistic approach to politics is recognizing that politics is war, that you have friends and you have enemies. All that matters is who holds power at any given time and using that power when you have it to reward your friends and to punish your enemies. This is one approach to politics, and there are people who think that this is the more realistic approach.
(08:28):
I think it’s a very dangerous approach, not just because I think it may be immoral, and we could get into why, on principled grounds, I’m not comfortable with it. But if you normalize treating politics that way and using government power in that way, then you’re also normalizing the other side doing the same thing to you. That’s part of the reason I’m not comfortable with it, and why I wouldn’t advocate any political movement going down that road in the first place.
Mitch Daniels (08:58):
It's ironic to hear people who once would have called themselves, and might still call themselves Conservatives, making this case. The argument that life is all about power, not about values, virtues, abstractions like freedom, just purely about power. That's always been, in my experience, the argument of the Left, and now I think we're hearing it reciprocally from the other side.
Stephanie Slade (09:25):
In fairness, some folks in this camp who once identified as Conservatives say conservatism no longer meets the moment. So we actually need to abandon conservatism and be more revolutionary, counter revolutionary. I have written, in many ways, they are basically Right-wing progressives. If you think about what progressivism has always stood for, which is a belief in a strong central state that wields power in order to try to bring about the world that we want to see by force, that's okay with centralization, bureaucratization, standardization, passing laws, wielding power, this is very progressive, and this is a thing that you are hearing from folks on the Right. So rather than calling them Conservatives, I call them Right-Wing Progressives.
Mitch Daniels (10:06):
It's an intriguing label, and one that I hope will catch the attention of people who may not have thought of themselves in quite that way.
(10:15):
Now, you have made the case, and it's a noble case, for your term has been “liberal forbearance,” which is the way many of us were raised, that governed by consent of the governed. We only prosper and make headway if we are reasoning with each other, at least if we are empathetic enough and considerate enough to try to resolve differences or let differences exist where they can't be resolved. But is that practical in a warfare world, as you just described?
Stephanie Slade (10:57):
This is the core of the disagreement. I like thinking of liberalism, and of course, by this I mean classical liberalism, again, not Left-wing leftism, in terms of mutual forbearance. This is how it works ideally, it's mutual. Both sides agree. We can coexist peacefully together, even if we don't agree about everything. If we both agree I will not try to impose my values and my way of life on you by force and you will not try to impose your values and your way of life on me by force, and this is how you end up with peaceful coexistence in a pluralistic society.
(11:29):
But what some folks would say is, well, okay, that's fine if both sides are willing to agree to it, but what happens if the other side isn't willing to make that bargain? And that often seems to be the position that Conservatives feel. They say, the Left has no problem with using state power to try to enforce its values on us, so shouldn't we be willing to fight fire with fire, right? Shouldn't we respond in kind?
Mitch Daniels (11:53):
Yes, exactly. Those of us who were raised to turn the other cheek, so to speak, can feel that this is asymmetrical combat, for the reasons you just described. I think the further complication is that it’s not simply the government. Someone could argue, ‘Well, you just have to wrest control of the government away from those who would misuse or abuse it.’ But the problem now is that it’s not just the government it’s what Lenin would have called the commanding heights of the economy. Business, and the media in particular, seem arrayed on one side. They’re not playing the role of either fortifying the middle or acting as a neutral umpire.
Stephanie Slade (12:53):
Yes, but ultimately, I think the entity I want to be a neutral umpire is the government, actually. The government’s job is to treat us all the same. We should have equality under the law. That’s very important, I think, to a society that functions well and has the rule of law: everybody is treated equally and has equal rights under the law. And that means I want to see a government that acts as an umpire. It’s not choosing winners and losers. It’s not taking one side over another. If we’re going to live in a pluralistic society where people disagree, we need somebody that just keeps the peace.
(13:26):
Private institutions, civil society institutions, community organizations, social institutions, this is actually where the battlefield and that give and take is occurring, those debates over those deeper values should play out. So you have members of my religious group who are making a substantive argument about right and wrong, and not everybody in society is going to agree with us. But because we aren't able to use the coercive power of the state to force them to live the way we want to live then, we can still live in peace. We can still have that give and take. We can agree to disagree or we can debate it out and then go our separate ways or whatever the case may be. There are lots of other ways to negotiate these disagreements. And it's better done in that non-governmental sphere as opposed to trying to push it into the political governmental sphere, which necessarily means one side wins and gets imposed on everybody else, whether they like it or not.
Mitch Daniels (14:18):
Well, you have been an articulate advocate in an admittedly new environment, that we've just been discussing, of a historically important concept, fusionism. When do you use the term these days, and when do you think about the best way to defend liberty and to resist the impositions of those who would use government and every other tool to tell the rest of us how to live? When you use the term today, is it precisely the same one? Are you talking about the same elements fusing as Frank Meyer was all those years ago, or is it something you have updated to the current day?
Stephanie Slade (15:10):
I think that there are some things that are eternally true. When I talk about fusionism, and historically the way that term was coined and what it was coined to refer to, was not actually the way it tends to be remembered by folks today.
(15:24):
People today, when I talk to them, they say, oh, fusionism, right? That was the coalition that came together during the Cold War years to oppose communism. You had Conservatives and you had Libertarians and you had the military hawks, and they came together as a three-legged stool, and they were all opposed to global communism and the Soviet Union, and it was a successful coalition for that era, but it maybe isn't as needed today. This is the thing I often hear.
(15:47):
And what I’m trying to get across in my writing about fusionism is that, in fact, although there were many, and always have been many, coalitions in politics, fusionism wasn’t just a call for different, disparate groups to come together because they had a common enemy. Instead, it was a philosophical synthesis that Frank Meyer of National Reviewarticulated, where he said, ‘A good society must be both free and virtuous. We need liberty, and we need virtue.’ And those two things are mutually reinforcing. You can’t have one without the other. You can’t have a free society that isn’t virtuous if the people themselves aren’t virtuous, and you’re not going to have virtuous people if they’re not free. So we have to defend both. We can’t just choose one or the other. We must defend them both.
(16:31):
So you can see that this is not about practical political coalition building. This is a philosophical synthesis about truth, about what is a good society, what are the components of a good society. If he was correct, I tend to think he was, that a good society requires both liberty and virtue and that these two things need each other. You can't just have one or the other. Everything will collapse if you only have one of the two pillars that society is resting on. The whole thing is going to come down.
(16:59):
Then that's going to be true today in the same way as it was during the Cold War years. Nothing about the Soviet Union ending changes that reality. This is still, I think, what we should be working towards is building a free and virtuous society. So that's fusionism. Fusionism is the fusion of these two values or these two principles and not just a bringing together of disparate groups into a coalition. And so I think, if it's true yesterday, it's true today.
Mitch Daniels (17:26):
Well, it was true before yesterday, in a sense. The founders were very, very clear that only a virtuous people, many of them thought that virtue had to be grounded in religion. Some were more vague than that, but they always thought that was a presupposition of an enduring Republican or Democratic system.
Stephanie Slade (17:50):
Absolutely.
Mitch Daniels (17:51):
Well, let me press you just a little further on this. Libertarianism versus libertinism. There’s certainly a thread of absolute maximum freedom, with no limits and no particular value judgments about what kinds of behavior are and aren’t right. So when you say virtue, is that consistent with that view? Does a true libertarian, committed to the principles you just enunciated, believe that self-restraint, at least, is essential, whatever the rules of society may permit?
Stephanie Slade (18:34):
So I am a Libertarian, small-L libertarian. I work for a Libertarian magazine, but at Reason we talk about us being big tent Libertarians, meaning there's a lot of different ways that you can come to your Libertarian views, and we're not going to try to kick you out of the tent just because you don't. And so one of the ways I wrote an article a few years ago in which I differentiated between what I call political Libertarianism and comprehensive Libertarianism.
(18:58):
I am a political libertarian. I think that liberty is basically the highest political value. It's the thing that I want my government to be emphasizing and prioritizing. That doesn't mean that I believe that it is the highest value in life more broadly. Outside of the governmental sphere, I think there are many more important things besides just maximizing liberty in every sphere of life, right? In your relations with your family or with your neighbors, I do not think trying to maximize your own personal autonomy or liberty is the right way to be living your life. So that makes me, I think, a political libertarian, but not, what I call in my article, a comprehensive Libertarian. Where somebody might say, no, I really think that liberty is just the highest value for me in all spheres of life.
(19:37):
Those are two different ways to be Libertarian. It depends who you're talking to, where they're going to come down on that. I have friends and colleagues who are much closer to a pure comprehensive Libertarian perspective than I am. I still think that I count as Libertarian though, because I do want a government that can come together because our public policy preferences are going to be very much overlapping.
Mitch Daniels (20:00):
When you talk to your comprehensive friends about virtue, what do they say?
Stephanie Slade (20:06):
This is interesting. So in the fusionist understanding, virtue was defined in a very traditional Judeo-Christian sense. But it’s important to define our terms, right? Because if you talk to someone on the left, they have their own understanding of virtue, which is very different from mine. And there’s a reason the term ‘virtue signaling’ arose to describe what folks on the left do. They believe they are being very righteous in the things they advocate for, yet those things are very different from what I might believe as a Christian.
(20:33):
So the kind of virtue that I defend as a Fusionist, that is in keeping with the tradition of fusionism going back to the founding, is a traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of virtue, and that is one that is probably not going to be as important to some Libertarians. Many Libertarians are not believers at all. And so, I have friends and colleagues who are atheists, for example. They're not going to share my understanding of virtue.
(20:59):
I would not characterize them as Fusionists, but I still think that we can be political allies in various ways because again, in the sphere of what is the proper role of government in society, we can come together. We probably very much agree on those questions, even if stepping outside of that space into questions about how do we live our lives, what does a good life look like, what are we called to, what are our moral obligations, we might have disagreements. But since none of us are trying to impose that view on everyone else by force, we can still coexist.
Mitch Daniels (21:32):
The Greeks enumerated specific virtues. Ben Franklin also enumerated specific virtues, though without grounding them, of course, in theism, as in the original Greek version. Could that be where your friends can find themselves in agreement with you?
Stephanie Slade (21:57):
Probably. I mean, it depends who you talk to. Yes, it's a good point though. It's a good clarification that you don't have to be a believer, a person of faith, a Christian in order to believe that we have some moral obligations to each other, of course. But that is a thing that has to be taught and passed down from generation to generation, and I do think we've lost some of that as we've secularized as a society. We have started to focus on other things. We're not necessarily teaching the next generation to think in terms of what are my obligations to my brothers and sisters.
Mitch Daniels (22:27):
Let me ask you about young people today. In the months just before we're recording this interview, we've seen some behavior, certainly on certain college campuses, that is hostile to many of the views that you and I might hold. We've seen public opinion, however accurate it is or isn't, your former colleagues measuring this and finding a lot of hostility to freedoms like free speech, to freedom of economic activity. What gives here? Are these attitudes that you think are likely to last or will they submit to reality as these young people mature?
Stephanie Slade (23:23):
Great question. I think if I had to do my best and take a shot at diagnosing and explaining how we got here, I think part of the problem is that young people these days, and this was maybe true somewhat to some extent for my generation as well, but less so. But certainly as we're dealing with the younger and younger generations, I think we're raising them to be fearful.
(23:49):
And so we aren’t sending them out to play on their own. Their parents are hovering over them all the time. They’re being told that a climate catastrophe is on the horizon and that we’re all going to die. And young people today are less willing to get married and have children because they feel that bringing another generation into the world would be cruel, given what they believe the impact would be on the climate and things like that.
(24:14):
There's just a lot of fear and a sense of insecurity that comes along with that fear. So we're raising people to instead of being confident and going into the future with eyes open and wanting to accomplish and innovate and look for opportunities in these ways, there's a sense of, well, there's threats bearing down on me from every direction. Who is going to protect me from those threats? So the orientation is very different. Instead of what am I going to go into the world and accomplish, it's who's going to protect me from these threats that are bearing down on me.
(24:45):
And so it’s understandable that they would often turn to the entity that is seen, unfortunately, as being on the front lines of serving our needs, which is the state. And more and more, I think people turn immediately to the question, ‘What law can we pass? What are you, politicians, going to do to protect me from the things I feel fearful of?
Mitch Daniels (25:06):
I think those insights are becoming better and better documented, the way we've been raising children, for one thing. Ironically, parents who are being very protective may be leaving their youngsters in a more vulnerable position as opposed to a safer one.
(25:28):
You've written about this phenomenon we now call intersectionality in which various grievances are said to be all entangled with each other, all really part of the same fabric, however disparate they may appear to be. Talk about that. Am I describing it accurately? Where did it come from and what are its implications?
Stephanie Slade (25:58):
I always want to start by saying that I think that this emerges out of good intentions. That there are many people, especially young people, who look around at the world and they see injustices, and they look back at the past and they see even more injustices, and they want to do something about them, and they want to recognize those who have maybe not gotten what seems like a fair shake because of who they are, because of the color of their skin, because of their gender, whatever the case may be. They think, well, we should somehow try to make it up to them socially as a society. We should try to make it up to these folks.
(26:30):
The way it goes wrong, the way it has gone wrong, is that it has trained a generation of people to think in terms of how I can stack up my victim points one on top of another because that's how you get status under a system like this. So I think what we do is we award status based on, well, how many kinds of victimization do you have? I mean, I'm a woman, so I've had to deal with the patriarchy. But you're a man, so you haven't had to deal with that. But somebody else who maybe is part of the LGBT community or is of another race or ethnicity, they have even more victim points that they can stack up, and so they have more status. And there's nothing that you or I could ever do to match their status under a situation like this.
(27:09):
It's very divisive. It creates these divisions and the sense of permanent status differentials that nothing can be done about because it's all about the essences of who we are. Nothing about what I've done or what you've done or what kind of people we are, but it's just what do we look like, what are our demographic characteristics? I think this is very unhealthy. I think it's quite dehumanizing in exactly the same way that the kinds of prejudices that this was supposed to be combating was dehumanizing, treating people as a member of a community that’s not based on who you are as an individual, but just what do you represent, what group do you represent. It does the same thing, unfortunately.
Mitch Daniels (27:47):
But you have observed that, compared to the great world religions, comparison breaks down at the point where there's no forgiveness, there is no atonement, which is generally the goal really of the other face.
Stephanie Slade (28:07):
That's right.
Mitch Daniels (28:07):
Did I read you right?
Stephanie Slade (28:08):
Yeah, so there has been this debate for a long time about whether wokeness or intersectionality or this political correctness should be viewed as a substitute or a pseudo religion. And there are many ways in which it does seem to be filling that same space in some people's lives. They're looking for meaning. They're looking for something higher that they can dedicate their lives to. They believe that, again, that there are injustices in the world, and they want to do something about that.
(28:35):
But yes, you’re pigeonholed based on characteristics that have nothing to do with your choices or the person you’ve chosen to be. And there’s really nothing you can do to change where you fall in that victimhood hierarchy. Well, in fact, there are things you can do. You can choose to take on and this is, I think, part of the reason we see so many more young people identifying as members of the LGBT community, because they can gain points that way. But for the most part, you’re rigidly stuck in a hierarchy. You can’t work hard, and you can’t do anything to change your status. You’re just stuck. And if you’re low on the totem pole, you’re simply told to deal with it, because that’s the way it is.
(29:21):
This is certainly not the way the Judeo-Christian tradition approaches things. In that framework, you’re not treated as permanently a sinner. The Judeo-Christian tradition would say that if you are a sinner, you can atone for that. You can heal the community by coming back into fellowship with your fellow Christians, or with your fellow community members. That kind of restoration isn’t really possible in the current leftist political dynamic, unfortunately. People are told they’re stuck where they are, permanently in that position, with nothing they can do to atone and nothing they can do to be forgiven for their supposed sins, which of course have nothing to do with anything they’ve actually done.
(30:03):
This just isn’t healthy. It’s not healthy, and I think that likening it to a religion actually cheapens religion. It brings religion down to a level where you fail to see the transcendent qualities that make religion great.
Mitch Daniels (30:22):
I mean, your description of the helplessness, the hopelessness, the immutable nature of this, that's oppression. Whether the oppressions that we are told that we are lectured about so often these days are real or imagined or exaggerated, that's real oppression when there's no relief, there's no escape, there's no way to rise up.
Stephanie Slade (30:42):
Right.
Mitch Daniels (30:45):
You've been critical of the actions of some self-described Conservatives, or maybe it's the new big government Conservatives we were talking about earlier, to criticize, attack, limit a business and the operations of the free market. Do they not have any point at all? I mean, does an unfettered free trade, free market system not occasionally come with costs in terms of cultural stability and things we should care about?
Stephanie Slade (31:27):
Yeah, life is full of trade-offs, of course. So yes, capitalism and a dynamic capitalist order, a free-market, free-enterprise system, is going to be, in some sense and in some ways, destabilizing for some people. We’ve seen many cases of people choosing, for example, to move from where they grew up, from a small town where they knew everyone, to a big city with better job opportunities. They’re influenced by economic incentives to make that choice. Some people might say this is a tragedy, that they’re severing their ties and their roots, and going to a place where they’ll be a faceless automaton in a city where they don’t know anyone. And for them, this is a tragedy.
(32:07):
And I don’t want to deny that there’s some truth to those complaints. Dynamism is destabilizing in many ways, but it also has incredible upsides. So you always have to think in terms of both sides of that trade-off. Do you really want to sacrifice the gains we’ve had in terms of material well-being and opportunity from a dynamic free-market order, for the most part? I mean, it’s not a fully free market, as we all know. But the dynamism and the gains that come from it have been incredible, especially in really important areas, like lifting people out of abject poverty around the world and creating more and more opportunities for more and more people.
(32:51):
I don’t want to sacrifice that in order to try to keep people frozen in place, to stop that dynamism. It may feel chaotic, and it may feel a little frightening to live in a world that’s always changing around us. But trying to freeze people in place requires so much coercion, so much force, and so much top-down imposition of someone else’s views about what’s good for you, that to me, it’s much more dangerous than the alternative.
(33:21):
People always have the option to make different choices in a free society, which is what we want. It's not one where anybody is forced to, for example, leave their small town to move to the big city. You have the choice to say, do I want to take that job? Do I want to pursue that career? Do I want to launch my own business where I'm going to be working 80 hours a week because I'm trying to get this business off the ground because I have a big dream for what I want to accomplish? Or do I want to be an employee at a company where I receive my salary and I go home to my family on the weekends? People should have those choices and they should be able to make the choice that's right for them, and that can always happen in a free society. It should be happening all around us all the time.
(33:57):
What makes me nervous is when somebody says one or the other of those should be the only option available to people.
Mitch Daniels (34:03):
You were critical of the governor of Florida for challenging the status of Disney, the Disney Corporation and Disney World. Is that a good example of the government punishing dynamism in some way, or was something else going on there?
Stephanie Slade (34:23):
I think it was something even worse, actually. I saw Governor Ron DeSantis’s attempt to go after Disney’s status in the state of Florida as an attack on the rule of law. The reason is that, under existing law, different entities could apply to the state for what’s known as special business district status, which gave them certain rights to use their land in specific ways. At the time, there were something like 1,800 or 2,000 of these districts in Florida. DeSantis went after just one of them, the Walt Disney World special business district, after the company spoke out against a state law he favored. And he was very open about the fact that his move to target their status was retaliatory.
(35:16):
So to me, this is a government actor going after a private entity in retaliation for political speech. And that is very clearly, as far as I'm concerned, a violation of our First Amendment rights. It shouldn't happen, and so that is why I considered that to be problematic.
(35:29):
If you wanted to say the whole idea of having special business districts was a mistake, it's a form of cronyism. Okay. We can have that conversation. You can make the case for why that might be. But if you're targeting only one of those out of 1,800 of them in the state, and it happens to be the one that has spoken out against a law you favor, and you're admitting openly on cable television that that's why you're doing it, then we have a problem.
Mitch Daniels (35:52):
Well put. You almost convinced me. We've talked about, as I don't think can be avoided these days, the threats to freedom, the downsides, the risks, the overt opponents. I want to give you a chance, as we wrap up, to brighten my day a little bit. You'll be there, I won't, but you'll be there at mid-century to see America as it exists then. Do you believe it'll be more free than today or less so, and what makes you think that?
Stephanie Slade (36:30):
I don't know. But the reason that I continue to be hopeful, despite the many dark things that are happening, especially in our politics in recent years, is that when I look at, and here's an instance where I'm going to call upon polling data and hope that what it says is correct, there are all kinds of troubling trends, extremism on both the left and the right growing. But actually these are still pretty small numbers on the fringes, on the left and right fringe of our polity.
(36:58):
The vast majority of Americans are somewhere in the middle. Your average Republican, your average Democrat do not want to see the other side destroyed. They want to live in peace with people, whether they agree or disagree with them. This is true. There was a statistic that said that the number of people who said they would be very upset if their child married somebody from the opposite party, it had doubled or tripled or quadrupled even, and people were wringing their hands, oh, my gosh, four times as many people now would be very upset. This shows how polarized we have become as a society.
(37:31):
But I dug into those numbers and looked at the poll they were actually referring to. What did it really find? And what it found was that the number had gone from something like 4% to something like 16%. So yes, that’s a trend I don’t like. I’m going to keep an eye on it, and I’m going to try to do something about it, if I can, through my work, and hope that other people will do the same. But it’s still a small minority of the country that’s polarized in that way.
(37:54):
Most people want to coexist peacefully with their neighbors, and they don't actually care that much if their neighbor doesn't share all their political or religious views. Most people's lives are not dominated by politics. It can be easy for somebody like me, who lives in Washington DC, to forget that. But this is one instance where the polling actually has been quite consistent across time, that most Americans don't feel that way, and so I'm glad to take my cue from them in this instance.
Mitch Daniels (38:21):
Well, thank you for injecting that note of hope. I'm hopeful too. And one reason, Stephanie, is because you, and people like you at Reason and elsewhere, are thinking and writing and arguing persuasively on behalf of the liberties that this nation, with all its struggles, still represents to the world, and I hope will again. Thank you so much for your work and for joining us on the Future of Liberty.
Stephanie Slade (38:47):
It was an honor. Thank you.
Outro (38:50):
The Future of Liberty has been brought to you by Liberty Fund, a private educational foundation dedicated to encouraging discussions of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.