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, thank you so much for making time for us.
Stephanie Slade (00:37):
Thank you so much for having me.
Mitch Daniels (00:38):
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):
Yeah, so about 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. And so it was a lot of fun to get 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. And so 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 helping with editing, but mostly I get to do my own writing, which I am very excited about.
Mitch Daniels (01:50):
Whoever's making the trains run is still doing a good job. Those of us in the consuming end are awfully happy that we get to see and hear and read more of you. So.
Stephanie Slade (02:01):
Thank you.
Mitch Daniels (02:02):
Good choice. One other thing before we get to issues of the day. Sometime right before Reason I gather you were in the public opinion polling business or survey research business, and tell us just a little bit about that and also in the intervening years, there's an industry that's gone upside down in terms of its techniques, the difficulties of reaching and accurately discerning what the public's thinking. What do you got to say about that?
Stephanie Slade (02:33):
Yeah, 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 was considered an acceptable amount of time for a length of a survey that you would administer. And there was a 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, and very few people want to stay on the phone with a stranger for 20 minutes or more.
(03:23):
And so the industry has had to really think hard about what do we do in the face of all these challenges? And I have not been in that world now, so I haven't actually been on the front lines of 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 waiting to try to just make the responses they get makes sense and reflect reality. I think that I am not ready to write off the whole industry, and so 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 being a very healthy instinct, whether we're talking about polling or our government and its operations. You've written some very interesting things about this. Even more recent phenomenon I would say, of the populist right sometimes said. To me, this rather rapid transformation, a really inversion of the parties Democrats now the party of the rich and the well-educated, Republicans 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 and where did it come from and where would it take us?
Stephanie Slade (05:05):
Yeah, 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, right? People, maybe they completed their high school diploma but they didn't go on to college 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 Democrats today, and if you didn't go to college or if you are a sort of blue collar worker, you're much more likely than you used to be to be a Republican.
(05:48):
So there are definitely changes afoot. 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 and so let's get behind industrial policy and tariffs and so on and so forth. I'm more skeptical of that, but I do acknowledge that there are now two sides of this debate, whereas once upon a time, if you are a Republican, you probably believed in individual liberty, believing a government 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.
(06:34):
Again, limited government on one side, big government, robust government, muscular government on the other side, and you now have conservatives who are 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. I'm not convinced that that's necessarily the future. I'm very hopeful. I think this is very much an open debate still, so 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 sort of marketplace of ideas.
Mitch Daniels (07:10):
Yeah. Well, let me ask you about one. I would say maybe extreme is the term version of the phenomenon you just described. There are some folks and you've written about and interviewed who not only want to see a more active government to promote economic interests that they think have been threatened or damaged by unfettered markets, but also cultural norms and behaviors and conduct. You've quoted one person who said that we need government to enforce our order and orthodoxy. Is there anything remotely practical about that? Even if it were a good idea?
Stephanie Slade (08:06):
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, and 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. I think it is a very dangerous approach. So not just because I think it maybe is 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 that way, then you are normalizing the other side doing the same to you. And so this is part of the reason that I am not comfortable with, and 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've called themselves- might still call themselves- conservatives, making this a 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're 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 bring about, 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. 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 in a governed by consent of the governed, we only prosper and make headway if we are reasoning with each other, at least if 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 (10:56):
Yeah, this is the disagreement, 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 is 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. 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 does often seem to be the position that folks 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 (11:52):
Yes, exactly. Those of us who were raised to turn the cheek so to say can feel that this is asymmetrical combat for the reasons you just expressed. I think the further complication is that it's not simply the government because someone could argue, well, you just have to wrest control of the government and away from those who would misuse it or abuse it. But the problem now is it's not just the government, what Lenin would've called the commanding heights of the economy business. The media in particular seem arrayed on one side. They're not playing the role of either fortifying the middle or of being a neutral empire.
Stephanie Slade (12:53):
Yeah, but ultimately, I think that the entity that I want to be a neutral empire is the government. Actually, the government's job is to treat us all. We should have equality under the law. This is very important I think to a society that functions well and has rule of law is that everybody is treated equally equal rights under the law, and that means I want to see a government that acts as an empire. 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, right? Private institutions, civil society institutions, community organizations, social institutions, this is actually I think where the battlefield, where that give and take 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 there are 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 them, we can still live in peace.
(13:54):
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 what an admittedly new environment that we've just been discussing of an historically important concept fusion. When you use the term these days, and when you think about the best way to defend liberty and to resist the impositions of those who would use government, 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, and so when I talk about fusion and historically the way that term was, what it was coined to refer to was not actually the way it tends to be remembered by folks today. People today, when I talk to them, they say, oh, fusion, right? That was the coalition that came together during the Cold War years to oppose communism. And so 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 to today. This is the thing I often hear, and what I am trying to get across in my writing about fusion is in fact, although, although there were many, and there always are many coalitions in politics, fusion was a term that said not that we should work together, that different groups should disparate groups should come together and be willing to work together because they had a common enemy.
(16:05):
Instead, it was this philosophical synthesis that Frank Meyer of National Review articulated in which he said, A good society must be both free and virtuous. We need liberty and we need virtue. And these two things, they're mutually reinforcing. So you can't have one without the other. You can't have a free society that's not virtuous if the people aren't virtuous, and you're not going to have virtuous people if they're not free. So we must defend them both. We can't just choose one or the other. We must defend them both. 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, and 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.
(16:49):
You can't just have one or the other sort of everything will collapse. If one of the two pillars that society is resting on goes away, the whole thing is going to come down, 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 fusion. Fusion 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 that is just 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 (17:49):
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, no limits, no particular value judgments about what sort of behavior is and isn't, right? So when you say virtue, is it consistent with that view or some, there's a true libertarian committed to the principles. You just enunciated believe that self-restraint at least is essential whatever the rules of society permit.
Stephanie Slade (18:34):
Yeah, 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, so 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, but that doesn't mean that I believe that 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 in your relations with your family or with your neighbors. I do not think trying to maximize your own personal autonomy
(19:24):
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. 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 government and we can come together because our public policy preferences are going to be very much overlapping.
Mitch Daniels (20:00):
When you talk to, in your term, comprehensive friends about virtue, what do they say?
Stephanie Slade (20:06):
Yeah, this is interesting. So in the fusionist understanding, it was a very traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of the word virtue, but it is important to define our terms, right? Because if you talk to somebody on the left, they have their understandings of virtue which are very different from mine, and there's a reason that the term virtue signaling arose to describe what folks on the left do because they believe that they're very righteous in the things that they're advocating for, and yet they're advocating things are very different than the things that I might believe as a Christian. So the kind of virtue that I defend as a fusionist that is in keeping with the tradition of fusion, 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.
(20:57):
They're not going to share my understanding of virtue, and so I would not characterize them as fusionist, but I still think that we can be political allies in various ways on the things, 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 do 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 enumerated specific virtues without specifically without grounding them at all. Of course, in the original, in the Greek version, in a theism, could that be where your friends could 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 the 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 and as we 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. Yeah.
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 to take a shot at diagnosing, 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 certainly as we've gotten, we're dealing with the younger and younger generations. I think we're raising them to be fearful, and so we aren't sending them out to play on their own right? Their parents are hovering over them all the time. They're being told that the climate, the catastrophe is on the horizon and we're all going to die, and young people today are less willing to get married and have children because they feel like bringing another generation into the world would be cruel in the face of what the impact it would have on our climate and things like this.
(24:14):
There's just a lot of fear and sense of insecurity that comes along with that fear. So we're raising people to, instead of being confident and sort of 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. And so it's understandable that they would very often turn to the entity that is seen unfortunately as being on the front lines of serving our needs, which is the state. And so more and more and more, I think people just, they turn immediately to what law can we pass? What are you politician going to do to protect me from the things that 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, that parents who are being very protective may be leaving your youngsters in a more vulnerable position as opposed to a safer one. Let me ask you about the, we'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 the way it goes wrong, the way it has gone wrong. I think that has trained a generation of people to think in terms of how can I stack up my victim points one on top of another, because that's how you get status under a system like this.
(26:43):
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 of another race or ethnicity, they have even more points, 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. So it creates actually a very, 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 person 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, 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'd have observed that at least compared to the great world religions, that comparison breaks down at the point at which there is no forgiveness, there is no atonement, which is generally the goal really of the other face.
Stephanie Slade (28:06):
That's right.
Mitch Daniels (28:07):
Do I read you right?
Stephanie Slade (28:08):
Yeah. So there has been this debate over for a long time about whether wokeness or intersectionality, the political correctness should be viewed as a substitute or 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 that in the world and they want to do something about that. But yes, I think that the thing that is missing is that it is entirely, again, you're pigeonholed based on what characteristics that have nothing to do with your choices or
(28:46):
The person that you have chosen to be, and there's nothing that you can do to change where you are in that victimhood hierarchy really well. In fact, there are things you can do, you can choose to take on. This is, I think, part of the reason that we see so many more young people identifying as members of the LGBT community because they can get points that way, but for the most part, you're sort of rigidly stuck in a hierarchy and you can do nothing about it, and you can't work hard and you can't do anything to change your status. You're just sort of stuck in, if you're a little on the totem pole, you're just told to deal with it because that's the way it is. This is certainly not the way that we think. The Christian tradition approaches things where if you have, because you're treated as a permanently a sinner, whereas the Judeo-Christian tradition would say, if you're a sinner, you can atone for that.
(29:38):
You can sort of heal the community by coming back into community with your fellow Christians or your fellow community members in a way that is not really possible in this current leftist political dynamic. Unfortunately, people are just like, they're stuck where they are. They're told that you are permanently in that position and there's nothing you can do to atone. There's nothing you can do to be forgiven for your supposed sins, which of course had nothing to do with anything you've actually done. This is just not healthy. It's not healthy, and it's a way in which I think likening it to a religion actually cheapens the religion. It brings the religion down to a place that you're failing to see actually the transcendent qualities of what makes 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 (30:43):
Yeah. 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 have come with costs in terms of cultural stability and things we should care about?
Stephanie Slade (31:27):
Life is full of trade-offs of course, right? So yes, capitalism and a sort of dynamic capitalist order free market order free enterprise is going to be in some sense, in some ways for some people destabilizing, people are going to choose. We have seen in many cases, people choosing to, for example, move from where they grew up, the small town that they grew up in where they knew everybody, and to maybe a big city where there are better job opportunities. They're being influenced by economic incentives to make that choice where some people might say this is a tragedy. They're severing their ties and their roots, and they're going to a place where they're going to be a faceless automaton in a city where they don't know anyone, and this is tragedy, the questions, and I don't want to deny that, that there's some truth to those complaints.
(32:13):
Dynamism is destabilizing in many ways, but it also has incredible upsides, and so you always have to think in terms of both sides of that trade off, and do you really want to sacrifice the gains that we have had in terms of material well being and opportunity through the dynamic free market order for the most part, I mean, it's not a fully free market order as we all know that we're living in, but the dynamism and the gains that from that I think have been incredible in terms of some really important things like just lifting people out of abject poverty around the world and creating opportunities more and more opportunities for more and more people. I don't want to sacrifice that in order to try to keep people frozen in place where they are to stop that dynamism to try to, because it may feel chaotic and it may feel frightening a little bit to live in a world that's changing around us all the time, but trying to freeze people in place requires so much coercion and so much force and so much top down just imposition of somebody else's views about what is good for you.
(33:18):
That to me is much more dangerous than the alternative. 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 choices that's right for them. And that can always happen in a free society. It should be happening all around us all the time. 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 government punishing dynamism in some way or was something else going on there?
Stephanie Slade (34:22):
I think it was something even worse, actually. I considered the attempt by Governor Ron DeSantis to go after Disney's status in the state of Florida as an attack and assault on the rule of law in the state of Florida. And the reason for that is that there was on the books an ability for different entities to apply to the state and get what's known as a special business district status where they would have certain rights to use their land in certain ways. And there were like 1800 or 2000 of those in the state of Florida at the time, and Ron DeSantis went after the one Walt Disney World special business district that had come out against a law that he favored, a state law that he favored. They had, the company had spoken out against this law, and he was very open that his action to go after their status was retaliatory.
(35:15):
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. 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. You can make the case for why that might be, but if you're targeting only one of those out of 1800 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, 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? 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. 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, right? 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 ringing their hands, oh my gosh, four times as many people now would be very upset.
(37:28):
This shows how polarized we have become as a society. But I dug into those numbers and I looked at what is the poll that they're referring to actually? What did it actually find? And what it found was that the number had gone from something like 4% to something like 16%. So yes, that is a trend that I don't like, and I'm going to be keeping an eye on that trend, and I'm going to be trying to do something about it if I can through my work and hoping that other people will do the same, but it's still a minority, a small minority of our country that is polarized in that way. 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 religious views. Most people are not, their 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 am glad to take my cue from them in this instance.
Mitch Daniels (38:21):
Well, thank you for injecting that note of hope. One reason I'm hopeful, 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 (38:40):
It was an honor. Thank you.
Outro (38:50):
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