Steven B. Smith on Reclaiming Patriotism
2021-04-20 · Guest: Steven B. Smith (Professor of Political Science at Yale) · 45:22
Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes
Bob Zadek interviews Yale Professor Steven B. Smith about his book, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes. They discuss the distinction between patriotism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism, emphasizing that American patriotism is rooted in constitutional ideals and a shared cultural ethos rather than mere birthright or exclusionary identity.
Topics: Patriotism, Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, American Founding, 1619 Project, Abraham Lincoln, National Service, Political Philosophy
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Steven B. Smith: Professor of Political Science at Yale University
Defining Patriotism in a Polarized Era [00:00]
Announcer: You’re listening to the Bob Zadek Show, a full hour of libertarian discussion with the smartest guests on radio. Live, spontaneous, and thoughtful. It’s the show of ideas, not attitude. And your calls are welcome at 424-BOB-SHOW. Now, your host, Bob Zadek.
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. The show of ideas, never once the show of attitude. And have we got a show for you this morning.
We seem to be living in an era in this country, perhaps in the world, of intense, yes, irrational polarization. A world of extremes. And there’s no better time to spend an hour this morning discussing a concept that almost by definition is one which is a concept that invites a group of people to unite. It is, in a way, the opposite of extreme.
The subject is patriotism. Patriotism is an incredibly complex word, a rather strange word in the sense that patriotism is, of course, a virtue. It is an ideal that is aspirational. We would like to think that all of us have at least a strain, if not a strong motivation, to be patriotic. To carry around a warm feeling, a love if you will, for our country. But it’s not quite love.
Patriotism is so complex, I have found myself over the years wondering: Am I patriotic? Should I be patriotic? What does it even mean? To help me, thank heaven, our guest this morning, Steven Smith, has written a book—a wonderful book, an important book—which is so valuable to me, and it will be to you, because it answers all of the questions that I have had regarding the complex word patriotism and invites us to—now, from the title of the book—Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes.
That short title carries with it three concepts which we will discuss this morning: reclaiming patriotism. Reclaiming—have we lost it? Where did it go? Why did we lose it? How do we get it back? That’s a semester in itself. Patriotism—what does it mean? Are we patriotic? Is it, as some folks on the left would have us believe, the opposite of virtue? Is it something to be avoided, to be derided, to be unwelcome? And in an age of extremes—what exactly, what are the extremes that we live in today? How did we get there? Is living in an age of extremes the rule, or is it the exception? Are we living in exceptional times with our extremes, if we have extremes, or is this the normal way of operation and when we were less extreme, was that the unusual time?
Okay, Steven Smith, welcome to the show this morning. You have your work cut out for you. What are we reclaiming? What is patriotism? What are the extremes and how did we get there? Now, I’m not going to now turn off my microphone and have you speak for an hour. That’s an unfair burden. So first of all, welcome to the show this morning, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart, if my heart indeed has a bottom.
Steven B. Smith: Bob, thank you so much for that beautiful introduction. It’s an honor to be on the longest-running libertarian talk show on radio history. And thank you for inviting me.
The Academic Skepticism of Patriotism [02:40]
Bob Zadek: And I should say, Steven, just to introduce you, you have your PhD from the University of Chicago, and you are and have taught in Yale in the philosophy department since 1984. And you have focused your life—and I am envious that you got to do this—on political philosophy. Oh my goodness, to spend most of your time understanding the complexity of political philosophy. Oh, what a wonderful career you have had, and we are all benefiting from that career and from the books you have written. So thank you so much for being on the show.
Now, Reclaiming Patriotism in the Age of Extremes. Now, I’m going to ask you a question that I’m really curious about, and there’s an especial reason why I’m asking the question. The question is, of course, what would have prompted you to write this book at this time? And now I’m going to add a sub-question. You’re at Yale. We all have—it is generally understood or assumed, maybe rightly, maybe wrongly, probably more or less correct—that in the Ivy League, in the institutes of higher education around the country, patriotism is not one that gets you invited to every important dinner party in town. And I think Alan Dershowitz complained how he became a pariah over at Harvard when he became somewhat identified with Donald Trump. So here you are, you’ve chosen a book that meant—that would mean you’re probably going to eat a lot of your meals by yourself. So what prompted you to write the book?
Steven B. Smith: Bob, thank you for starting with this. Before going into that, I would like to just make one minor correction. I am actually in the Yale Political Science department rather than philosophy. I am happy to be regarded as a philosopher by you, but I actually earn my living in the political science department.
Bob Zadek: Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn off your microphone. It’s okay.
Steven B. Smith: Right. But the book, like most books and most of the work I’ve done in the past, has grown out of my teaching. And I’ve noticed among students there’s a great hunger to do something for their country, to help their country in some way, although their feelings are often inchoate. They don’t quite know what it means. They don’t even maybe don’t even quite know why they want to do this. But there’s a hunger, as they say, to give back. They realize they’ve been the recipient of a good education and they’ve had many benefits just being in America has provided them with benefits. They want to help.
But they often don’t know how to do it, and colleges and universities don’t even really necessarily make it easy. So my book sort of grew out of this question: What does it mean to want to support and to defend your country? And you’re absolutely right that writing a book like this, especially at a university like Yale—I don’t want to say that Yale’s unpatriotic, that would be untrue—but it’s not a question that tends to be raised by academics or in our intellectual culture today.
From, as you indicated in your intro remarks, from the left—and a lot of people in academia are on the left—being regarded as patriotic is symptomatic of chauvinism. It’s symptomatic of a kind of “me-first-ism,” “America-first-ism.” It seems unenlightened. We should be, so it’s argued, we should be citizens of the world. We should think in terms of the questions that unite humanity, not that simply focus on one nation or one people. That seems to be the dominant attitude that one finds in universities and intellectual circles today.
And the book was written in large part also to push back against that perspective. Patriotism is a virtue. I think that patriotism is required by democratic societies. Democracies can’t afford to do without patriotism. And as far as eating alone goes, I probably haven’t done quite as much as Alan Dershowitz to make myself a pariah on my own campus. But I have to admit, one of the hidden or secret pleasures I had in writing the book was sometimes the look of barely repressed horror on the faces of colleagues and other university people when they asked me what I was working on and I would say, “Well, I’m writing a book defending patriotism.” And they looked at me often with, “Oh, oh, that’s interesting. Let’s move on to the next thing.” But I wasn’t, thankfully, I wasn’t ostracized—not yet at least. Maybe after I’m on your show, Bob, I will be, but I don’t think so. But I haven’t been ostracized yet, and other than the COVID lockdown, I haven’t been taking unnecessarily large numbers of meals by myself.
Patriotism vs. Accident of Birth [06:40]
Bob Zadek: Now Steven, you said—you said in answering my question, you referred to students, they want to do something for their country. I perked up when you said their country. What makes it, other than the sheer accident of birth? What is it implied that wherever you happen to be born, you would not be virtuous unless you were loyal to the company—the country in which you happen to be born? And is patriotism like irrespective of the principles by which your country operates? Are you expected to be patriotic, or is there a value judgment? Is patriotism automatic, like as you and I spoke about earlier, if you’re born in Brooklyn, you better root for the Dodgers or else you’re a pariah, there’s something wrong with you? So tell me about what—whether a country has to earn patriotism or whether it’s expected as a matter of the accident of birth.
Steven B. Smith: That’s a good question. It’s one that I struggled with in thinking about the book and in writing it. Of course, at a place like Yale, students—I mean, obviously the majority of students are American students, but increasingly students come from all over the world and from many countries. Some of them privileged countries in terms of the freedom and wealth that their societies provide, others from very poor or countries that lack various kinds of freedoms—economic, political, private freedoms of all kinds.
My book is not a prescription for humanity. I’m writing for Americans. I don’t mean to be parochial about that, but I’m writing specifically about American patriotism. It’s not a one-size-fits-all. Patriotism can take different forms in different countries. Our patriotism is, in fact—one of the things that distinguishes it is not just a matter, although it can sometimes be seen this way, of “I was born here, this is why I’m patriotic,” just the accident of birth, as it were. And many people feel that’s, in a way, unobjectionable. I’ve got no real problem with that.
But I’m not really sure that captures what I want to say about what is distinctive about American patriotism. American patriotism has been from the earliest times, from the 18th century, even before in the Puritan founders when they came here in the 17th century, it has been rooted in ideas and ideals about what America is. The earliest founders coming here, Puritans, thought of themselves as creating a new holy city based in a new Jerusalem based in the wilderness. The American founding fathers thought of themselves as creating, and did create, the first written constitution based on ideas of freedom, equality, limited government, and so on.
We have been a people of, as I say in the book, we’ve been a people of the book from the beginning. Our patriotism has a textual basis. We think of ourselves as a people of ideas, and living up to those ideas and ideals are very important to what American patriotism is. It’s not just simply a matter of “I was born here, my country right or wrong,” and let the matter go at that. To be an American, to be an American patriot, I think is to always measure ourselves by the ideals and aspirations that we hold for ourselves as a country.
Loyalty to the Constitutional Regime [10:40]
Bob Zadek: So the patriotism, the loyalty, the love if you will—and that word is in your book—the patriotism is not to the present elected officials, for sure. It’s not to any one person. It’s really—and it’s not to the shining seas, the mountains, the fields of grain. The patriotism is to the abstract. It’s to the ideals. Therefore, your plea, if it is a plea, is to forget the disagreements we may have about the issues of the day. Go back a step, go back to the root, go back to the ideals. Let’s start with that. I think what you’re saying is: sign on to the concept of America, the ideal of America. Let’s start with that, so we have a common goal, and then we can work out how to get there. Is that an appropriate distinction to make, to separate the physical and the humans from the ideal? And is your book a reminder that this is about ideals? It’s about the shining city on the hill, if you will, not about who happens to be running for office and getting elected. That’s kind of mechanical.
Steven B. Smith: Right. I mean, yes, let me put it a little differently. I think that captures certainly an aspect of what I want to say about the book or what I want to say about patriotism. Patriotism is not—I mean, in America in particular—American patriotism is not loyalty to a leader, to an individual. That was very true in places like fascist Italy, where the Duce or the Fuhrer is the center of citizen loyalty. America has never been that kind of country.
Our loyalty has been to our Constitution. And in the book, I use an older word, a word that comes from Greek to describe a constitutional form. I call it a “regime.” Our loyalty and our patriotism has been to a particular kind of constitutional regime. So it is to a political form, not to an individual. That is not simply to say that that ideal has been a source of unity and consensus throughout American history. We have argued for over 250 years exactly what our Constitution is. A great civil war was fought over exactly that fact, and we continue to struggle with it even today.
So partly to be an American is to be engaged in a debate, in a conversation, in an ongoing dispute about what it means to be an American. That is part of America too, and that is what I think part of our patriotism means: accepting and being willing to engage in that debate over what it means to be an American and what our constitutional form, our democracy as it were, requires of us.
One of the arguments I make in the book is that patriotism is a disposition that is required—in fact, it’s indispensable—for democratic societies, I think, for any democratic self-governing society. It’s necessary for people’s sense of self-respect and for their sense of—it enhances their sense of membership and belonging. And yet, that idea, patriotism, is today challenged by different forces in our world.
Let me try to talk a little bit about those too. On the left—and this is something one finds especially in educated and professional circles—people no longer really think of themselves primarily as citizens. They think of themselves—that seems parochial. That to them seems parochial. It seems old-fashioned. It seems sort of unnecessary even. We live in an—we all know this—we live in an increasingly interconnected world. We live in a kind of globalized world, made possible by travel, by trade, by all kinds of forces of modern technology, the internet, and other things. Much of our time is spent dealing with issues that are not specific to our own countries. Many people think we are on the way to becoming citizens of the world. I mean, that is an old concept. It’s not a new one, and I talk a little bit about the history of cosmopolitanism in the book. It goes back to ancient times.
But it has particular resonance today. Increasingly, again, we see our problems are global problems. We’re now locked down because of a global pandemic. There’s global warming. There’s, you know, many of our problems are genuinely global problems. So it’s not a position I simply want to sneer at, but it’s one that detracts from and it minimizes, if not even sort of despises, the idea that we are also citizens of particular countries with loyalties to our fellow citizens and loyalties to what we are as a people. So that’s on the left. Patriotism is challenged by the—again, this is not an insignificant thing—the globalization of the world.
On the right, on the other hand, patriotism is challenged by the upswing or upsurge that we’ve seen in recent years in particular of nationalism. Nationalism too is an old phenomenon. It’s nothing new, but it has come and gone in waves. And what we’re seeing today, not only in the US but throughout the world, is a resurgence of nationalism. Nationalism is the idea—nationalism and patriotism, I argue, actually grow out of a common root. They grow out of a desire of people to be—to have their way of life, to have their country, to have their culture strong and respected. That’s a legitimate and natural desire, no doubt.
But nationalism moves in a different direction from patriotism. Nationalism, I argue, is an ideology of us against them. It becomes an ideology of grievance and resentment. Nationalist language is always looking for enemies, whether they are foreign enemies or, if they can’t find foreign enemies, domestic enemies. Domestic others, as it were, to demonize and to vilify as somehow destructive of our national creed and belief. So nationalism and cosmopolitanism, in an odd way, sort of feed off of one another. It’s very possible that nationalism, the rise of nationalism, has emerged in response to globalization and so on, almost in a kind of dialectical way. But at the same time, nationalism has convinced many other people that we really need to double down on being cosmopolitans because we see many ways the ugly and nationalism has a kind of ugly side that cosmopolitans want to avoid. Patriotism, I argue, is something different. It’s different clearly from cosmopolitanism, but it’s different from nationalism also. We can go into this, but nationalism and cosmopolitanism are the two alternatives, the two as it were extremes as I put in the title of my book, that have put patriotism into question and why patriotism today needs to be reclaimed from both.
The Family Analogy for Patriotism [12:40]
Steven B. Smith: I would say even if there were only one country in the world, the nationalist would still find enemies—domestic enemies of one form or another to stigmatize and to accuse of usually it goes with accusations of betrayal, treason. We hear this all the time. “Enemies of the”—creating “enemies of the people.” I mean, this was communist language, and now it’s been reappropriated for nationalist uses today, describing different categories as enemies, as betrayers, and so on.
I put the difference between nationalism and patriotism this way, because I do argue, and I want to repeat, that they do in many ways grow out of a common desire, but they move in different directions. Patriotism, as I describe it, is a bit like loyalty to family or loyalty to—and what I mean by that is the following: we love our families, not because we think our families are the best families, that my family is better than your family. I mean, what would that even mean? We often love our families often precisely despite our flaws, despite our flaws and failures. That’s what makes them lovable to us in a certain way is their imperfections. What would it mean to say that my family’s the perfect family and that’s why it’s deserving of my love and respect?
And I would say the same is true of patriotism. Patriotism does not require me to think that my country’s better than yours or that my country is going to dominate yours in some ways. Patriotism is not an ideology of dominance and power. But it is based on feelings of loyalty, of rootedness, of love and respect for—and gratitude, mostly for gratitude for helping us become what we are.
Bob Zadek: And it’s interesting that you say that because when you made the parallel to family, it’s just as you said earlier. It’s not that you love your family better than somebody else’s family. It stops at you love your family. That’s the end of the conversation. And you love them because of who they are collectively and because they are your family, and that’s the appropriate way to feel. You don’t require other families to run a comparison. It’s not that you love your family because they are somehow better than another family. It stops with who your family is, which is the point I was making that it’s not competitive.
Steven B. Smith: Right. I mean, to draw on the family comparison again, you know, I love my family best. That doesn’t require me, right, to be put in a relation of competition and so on with other families. Our friends, our friends’ families are dear to us. We’ve, you know, we have friends who, like everybody, whose families are dear to us and whose children and whose parents mean a great deal to us, who we see for holidays and for celebrations. We love them too, but that doesn’t mean to say that we don’t give some kind of moral priority to our family, our families first. But you’re right, it is not to say that love of family puts us into a competitive, much less an adversarial, relationship with the families around us. And I would say patriotism captures, or it was my view of patriotism captures, something of that orientation.
Ethos Patriotism and Cultural Identity [14:40]
Bob Zadek: In your book, you worry about, you devote some attention to this balancing of, on the one hand, we are, as you point out in your book, the obvious, we are a country of immigrants, and to some degree the patriotism that many people feel is not only to the ideals, the political ideals, the relationship of government to the governed, but rather it’s this hypothetical, this theoretical cultural America. There’s an American culture, some would believe. I believe a bit less than that. But then you worry about, and you use the word balance, balancing the challenge of balancing this part of American existence is welcoming of immigrants in recognition of our founding, of our history, and then you worry about does that adversely affect or does it threaten the cultural part of patriotism? I was found myself much less concerned about that because the whole concept of American culture is, I think, one of a constantly changing music, food, entertainment, a lot of the customs of life as opposed to the governing political philosophy. And the fact that it’s always changing is itself the change is part of our culture. I don’t—sure, many, many nationalists find themselves concerned about that. Those people, their music, their whatever they see as the threaten to the American way of life. You worry about that a bit in your book. Can you expand upon that just a bit, why you’re worried? Because I don’t—I just don’t see that as a threat. I see it as sort of a feature, not a threat.
Steven B. Smith: Right. I do worry about that in the book. I am—I believe in borders, for example. I mean, I believe in states, I believe in borders. I believe immigration—we are a country of immigrants, as we often say. I mean, our immigration policy and our borders can be open, they can be generous, they can be more or less, but I don’t believe they can be infinitely open. I do believe in that.
And I agree with you, our culture—one of the things I talk about in the book, and here let me just go back a little to an earlier part of our conversation. Our patriotism is based in part on our ideals and aspirations. But I also say it’s based in what I call our ethos. We have an ethos patriotism as well. What do I mean by an ethos patriotism? That our patriotism is rooted in ideas and aspirations, yes, but it’s also rooted in our habits, our customs, our traditions, our what we might call broadly our way of life, that comprises our language, our music, our foods, our even things like our body language. We know sort of what it is to be—we know what these things are as Americans.
And patriotism is very much a rootedness also in these sort of cultural dimensions of American life. These are enriched, obviously as you put it, these change over time, they are enriched by new groups, new people who come here and add to this cultural cuisine that we have. And I think that has for the most part in our experience been a very positive thing. We have grown as a people, and that kind of ethnic and cultural diversity has been part of what the American story has been.
Can this be indefinitely expanded, or when do we begin as it were to sort of lose our sense of ethos? When do we lose a sense of common purpose and peoplehood? I mean, I think that is a question. It’s not a question that has an algorithm for solving that question. There’s no right answer to that question. It’s a question of judgment, it’s a question of political judgment. It requires wisdom. It does not require demagoguery. It does not require sort of laying down, as I would say, ethnic barriers to entry, but it does require wise statesmanship and leadership to help us work on exactly where diversity and pluralism contribute and where they may begin to depreciate, as it were, our common sense of peoplehood.
The Attack on American Principles [16:40]
Bob Zadek: One of the strongest statements I found in the book is you mention that the loyalty, the patriotism you invite people to experience is loyalty to—I think this was your phrase—loyalty to a hypothetical U.S. It’s a lot easier to be proud of, patriotic to, loyal to founding principles, the ideals, than it is to say be loyal to the present constitution—small ‘c’—of the House and the Senate and the presidency. That almost seems empty. I can’t find myself being loyal to Mitch McConnell. He doesn’t make me teary-eyed. Nothing personal, I mean, I’m picking him as a hypothetical part of—but it’s a piece of cake to be loyal to—it’s almost you have to be inhuman not to be loyal to the principles. And I think that part of your book really is the key: invite people to test the principles against their own values, and you have no choice, you in spite of yourself you’re going to become, I would think, patriotic.
Steven B. Smith: Right. But yes, I mean, I think that’s right. The principles are under attack, however. And one of the things the book wants—one of the things I try to do in the book is to help us restore an appreciation of precisely the principles. Why are they under attack? Projects, for example, like the New York Times 1619 Project would have us believe that America is founded in racism and slavery, and that this racism and slavery may have been abolished, but racism and white supremacy has been the core of American national identity from 1619 to 2021. And that it’s not that these represent departures from the principles, they claim these are the principles.
And that is a deeply, in my view, corrosive ideology. It is part of what I describe in the book as the kind of what I call the new-age progressivism that we see of recent times, to distinguish it from an earlier and older progressivism. We could talk about that, but this has become very much a part of the attack on American principles and American founding principles.
It’s not to say that American founding principles were somehow pure, were born pure. We have argued about those principles from the beginning. As I said earlier, we fought a great civil war over what those principles were. But I think Abraham Lincoln, who is a hero—the hero in many ways of my book—put it in the best way. He understood that American principles were founded in the Declaration of Independence, particularly its clause of human equality. That provided the bedrock of what America as a nation was. He understood clearly that those principles had not been perfectly realized in 1776 or in 1861, but that we struggle to achieve those ideals.
And to give up on those, as many on the left have done, and increasingly in many ways those on the right have done, I find to be a betrayal—I shouldn’t use that term, I said earlier that was part of nationalist language—but it really does represent a kind of fatigue, maybe that would be a better word, fatigue of what American patriotism is. Patriotism is a difficult—it is a virtue, and like any virtue, it’s difficult. We’re not just born with it. It’s not just part of our DNA. We don’t become patriots like we eat and breathe and other biological functions. It’s something that has to be taught, and it has to be cultivated. And like any practice—playing the piano or any skill—it requires practice, and it requires education. And it’s not easy. Being a patriot, particularly being an American patriot, is not easy. And part of my book is to try to teach people a little bit about how to reclaim it.
Reclaiming Patriotism Through Service [20:40]
Bob Zadek: I found you—I don’t—we haven’t got time to discuss the 1619 Project in detail, but what in law—in law, there is a rhetorical tactic called creating a straw man. You create an artificial villain and then you argue against that creation. And of course, you can’t attack the real facts because you lose. So you have to attack made-up facts. I think the 1619 Project was—you can’t attack the virtues of—you can’t attack the American founding principles. They’re not attackable. You can attack how we carried them out, you can attack the principles. Therefore, you have to create fake principles which you can attack, and then you have a tempting target. I wish we had time to discuss the 1619, Steven, you’ll have to come back so we can spend an hour on that.
Now, in your book, we’ve discussed a bit about reclaiming. We have a couple of minutes left. How do you—what is the—how does one go about as a nation—we only have a minute or two, maybe it’s you haven’t got enough time, but we’ll do the best we can. How do you go about—how does a nation reclaim the glorious principles we have? About a minute, minute and a half.
Steven B. Smith: The last chapter of the book looks at some ways to do that. And it’s not just a question of going back, it’s a question of going forward as well. One of the things I think would be extremely important in trying to reclaim a sense of patriotism is to introduce some form of national service. I don’t know how you feel about this, Bob, being a libertarian, but I feel some form of national service—whether that’s military service, whether that’s teaching in a public school, whether that’s working for an underserved community—is a way of bringing young Americans together, getting them to know each other, people from different backgrounds. We don’t know each other anymore. We live in silos, we live in cultural or educational silos. People should get some chance in life to meet different people, people different from themselves. It will be a first and I think important step in helping us move forward in reclaiming some kind of American patriotism.
Bob Zadek: Well, national service—I have a visceral—I take a step back because national service sounds voluntary, but we’re talking about compulsory national service. So the service part of it is like the draft, except instead of a gun, you have a hoe and you’re out there conserving nature. But that’s, Steven, that’s for another day and another time.
Steven’s book is all about Reclaiming Patriotism in the Age of Extremes. We sure have an age of extremes. Patriotism would be a uniting principle if we take a step back, examine the principles to which we pledge allegiance every day, focus on the principles, not on the humans. And the reclaiming of patriotism, I think, Steven, as your book invites, is inevitable. Your book is almost an essential first step towards achieving the goal that you and I both want.
So Steven, thank you so much for writing your book. The book is called Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes. We sure have an age of extremes. Let’s hope patriotism gets reclaimed. And the way to reclaim it is just remind—just read the second and first paragraph of the Declaration, and patriotism will automatically flow. So Steven, thank you so much for the book. Thank you so much for spending an hour with us this morning. Apologies for the minor glitch I had with the internet. And Steven, I do hope you’ll come back because we have only started our conversations together. There’s so much more we can cover. So be—my friends out there, enjoy the book, learn from it, share the book with your friends. The country will be the better for it, and so will you and your friends. Steven, thank you so much for your time this afternoon.
Steven B. Smith: Bob, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much. And as my mom used to say, “From your lips to God’s ear.”
Bob Zadek: My mom said the same thing. Maybe we were separated at birth, Steven. So thank you so much, and thank you to my friends out there. Please enjoy the rest of the weekend.