Thaddeus Russell on Renegades vs. Conformists
2018-06-08 · Guest: Thaddeus Russell (Historian and Author) · 52:47
Renegade History and American Social Control
Bob Zadek interviews historian Thaddeus Russell about his book A Renegade History of the United States. They discuss the historical tension between “renegades”—those seeking personal pleasure and freedom—and “conformists” who seek social control through “democracy.” Russell elaborates on the psychological burden of participatory socialism and the shifting definitions of authoritarianism and puritanism in modern American politics and on college campuses.
Topics: Renegade History, Socialism vs. Counterculture, Democracy and Personal Freedom, Totalitarianism, The Draft, Conscription, Barack Obama, Drug Policy, Berkeley History, Puritanism
Speakers: Bob Zadek — Host Thaddeus Russell — Historian and Author
Introduction to Renegade History [00:29]
Bob Zadek: Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running libertarian talk radio show on the West Coast, indeed in the country. Thanks so much for listening this Sunday morning.
This morning, I’m delighted to welcome to our show for the entire hour, Thaddeus Russell. Thaddeus is one of the truly important, thoughtful observers of social and political life in America, and he brings to our show a point of view held by only very few people. And in my opinion, Thaddeus is right and they are wrong. You will decide for yourself.
Thaddeus, I first learned about Thaddeus when I learned about his book, A Renegade History of the United States. Thaddeus’s view is that much of the important political and social events in our country are the result of the work not of the mainstream politicians, the mainstream thinkers, but rather in his words: drunkards, laggards, prostitutes, and pirates. Thaddeus, interesting point of view. Help our audience understand how you arrived at this point of view, what motivated you to write the book, and how did you become Thaddeus Russell, the person who you are today? First, welcome to the show this morning.
Thaddeus Russell: Well, thanks for having me on, Bob. Well, that’s a lot to answer.
Growing Up in Radical Berkeley [01:24]
Bob Zadek: I know it’s a lot. Let me break it down or else it’ll be a one-hour monologue and I’ll just read the paper. Now, Thaddeus, you are a favorite son, if you will, of the Bay Area. You grew up across the bay from where I’m sitting right now, in Berkeley, California. Tell us, because it’s relevant to your point of view, tell us a bit about your early life, because it is both interesting and it is a social and political history of our country, at least recent history.
Thaddeus Russell: Yeah, well, I wouldn’t say I’m a favorite son of the Bay Area, but I am a son of it, I guess. I was born and raised in Berkeley, California, as you said, born in 1965. And so my formative years were the 1970s and early 1980s, all in Berkeley. And as you might imagine, if you know anything about Berkeley and that time, it was full of what we might call countercultural and radical people, including my parents, who were all members of a revolutionary socialist organization.
My mother and stepfather actually pretty much devoted their lives for about 10 years or more to organizing the working class for revolution, which meant that they dropped out of their upper-class lifestyles. Both were graduates of elite universities from very respectable families and could have had high-paying professional careers, but instead they chose for, as I said, more than a decade to work in factories and to work as clerical workers in order to, as they said, organize the working class for socialist revolution.
So they were part of a small organization, and that was their social life as well, was these radical socialists. So they would hang out at our house, they’d play poker every Saturday night at our kitchen table. They would lay out their weekly newspaper at our house. We also lived in the same neighborhood where the Black Panthers’ national headquarters was, which was actually in Berkeley. People might not often know that; it’s usually people think it’s in Oakland. We were living on the Oakland-Berkeley border, but we were right near the Black Panthers’ headquarters. So we were part of that milieu. Revolutionary socialists from Europe would often come through and stay with us or speak at our house. And I was at a lot of meetings of their group.
And then there was Berkeley generally, which at that time, of course, was very much full of hippies and ex-beatniks and sex, drugs, and rock and roll. So I saw from a very early age…
Bob Zadek: Thaddeus, I’ve been to Berkeley recently. It still is. It still is that.
Thaddeus Russell: No, it’s not. I mean, Berkeley’s very different than when I was growing up. There’s a lot more money there. There are certainly still some elements of the counterculture. You’ll see punk rockers on the street on Telegraph Avenue still panhandling, but it’s a much, much wealthier place. It’s a much more middle-class place. And it is much more, I think, of a place for young urban professional families. But yeah, you’ll still see some of that. What you will certainly still see in Berkeley is left-wing politics, which was, of course, all around me, and it’s still totally dominant in the culture of Berkeley, which makes it hard for me to go back and makes it the reason I say that I’m not necessarily the favorite son of the place.
Bob Zadek: Well, Berkeley, of course, statistically has the highest percentage of Bentleys with Bernie Sanders bumper stickers in the country.
Thaddeus Russell: Yeah, well, yeah, I think that was Mill Valley, actually, more where you are.
Bob Zadek: Mill Valley, exactly right.
Thaddeus Russell: But it’s up there. Berkeley is certainly like that. Yeah, a lot of champagne socialists over there.
The Aestheticism of Politics and Socialism [05:33]
Thaddeus Russell: So that was the environment. Yeah, so that was my early years. And what I found was—it took me quite a while to sort of figure this out, but I kind of always knew it instinctively, I suppose—I really liked one part of it, which was the countercultural part. I really did like the hippie movement in a lot of ways. I liked their attitudes about work and about patriotism and about identifying as Americans. I loved their ideas about sort of personal freedom, individual freedom, pleasure, sensual pleasure, drugs, sex, music. All that I thought was great, actually.
And I also felt like they were emotionally intelligent people. And I don’t—when I say hippies, people often get a stereotypical image in their mind. I mean, when I say hippies, I just mean people who were sort of interested in very countercultural ideas in the ’60s and ’70s, things that were very out of the norm in terms of lifestyle, not just politics. In fact, for me, hippies are the people who were much more interested in living differently day-to-day than in what we would call high politics. I mean, there wasn’t a whole lot of discussion about public policy or economic theory among the people I’m talking about here.
But I just thought that they lived better than my parents’ comrades, people who were very much into high politics, formal politics, social movements, organizing movements, all that. I felt like they were very limited in their lives, in their interests, that they were almost purely intellectual people of the mind. They were generally not very interested in things like popular culture or what was on TV or sports or even having fun, pleasure. I mean, those were all secondary. They were really wholly invested in remaking the world in the way that they thought it should be. And I just found that they were not fun people to hang out with, even when I was a kid.
So it took me a while to sort of figure that out. But by the time I was in my early 30s, I actually sort of made the intellectual move and started to have ideas and try to understand exactly what it was about socialism and socialists that I didn’t like, which turns out was socialism. I didn’t like socialism. And I think it actually produces people like my parents’ comrades, people who are sort of puritanical in a lot of ways, but more just sort of uninterested in the pleasures of life. And in fact, that’s why my mother and stepfather left the movement, because they were interested in material pleasures. They were interested in food, and they were interested in traveling, and they were interested in music and going to nice restaurants. And my mother liked jewelry and all this, you know, and liked to have a beautiful house and flowers and art. They collect art.
And that, I think they realized on some sort of emotional level that they didn’t fit in the movement either. So I think in a way, my subsequent career, my ideas, are a continuation of their moving away from the aestheticism of politics and socialism. By the way, this applies not just to socialists. Libertarians are pretty much just as bad in my experience. They tend to be of the mind. They’re intellectuals, just like me, so I’m not judging, I’m just stating a fact here, which means that generally speaking, they’re more interested in abstractions and ideas than they are in their bodies.
But so that’s where I—that’s, I guess, the origin-origin of my book, which is about people who live more or less, or have lived in history more or less, according to immediate desires of the body, what we might call immediate gratification or sensual pleasure, things like drinking, things like leisure, things like sex over social responsibilities. And those are the renegades in the book, and those are the people that I argue actually made history in a lot of good ways, simply by doing things they weren’t supposed to do in a puritanical culture, which the United States very much was in the 18th and 19th century, simply by, for instance, dancing in public in the 19th century. A woman doing that by herself or with her friends was just scandalous and not respectable at all.
But prostitutes were the first women to do that, and then it became, of course, standard, and now it’s completely normal. But the first women to do things like that, to dance in public, to smoke in public, to make high wages because prostitutes made very high wages, to own property because a lot of madams, the owners of brothels, owned quite expensive real estate, like in places like San Francisco…
Bob Zadek: And Sausalito.
Thaddeus Russell: Yeah, I don’t know about Sausalito, but they were certainly across the bay in San Francisco in the Barbary Coast area. And then, yeah, so that’s—so that’s how—I think that’s the connection. I mean, it took me about 20 years to make the connection, but I did finally with Renegade History after I had already gotten my PhD at Columbia University in American history. I started to put the ideas together.
So for me, socialism is really—what is it to me? It’s terrifying and maybe my worst nightmare. Not for—I think libertarians have very good critiques of it. They tend to be more concerned about efficiency and production and lack of incentive and all that, sort of good economic arguments. I think libertarians are correct in their critiques of socialism entirely. It’s just that that’s not so much my concern with it. My primary concern is that it requires constant work. It requires a merger of your identity with the nation-state or whatever the socialist entity is. You are now responsible for all of it, right? This is full democracy. This is the problem with democracy.
Democracy as the Enemy of Personal Freedom [07:52]
Bob Zadek: Yeah, I think you really nailed it when you pointed out that there’s a strange contradiction. Socialism requires a top-down, total, at least economic, but it bleeds over into the political, command and control with no room for individuality.
Thaddeus Russell: Well, that’s not exactly what I’m saying. No, it’s—true socialism is not top-down. True socialism is even worse. Top-down socialism, like in the Soviet Union, there was quite a lot of slacking off at work because the workers weren’t actually invested psychologically in the project of socialism, so they had to be commanded from Moscow. True socialism—I mean, it’s never happened, but you know, the theory, I will respect it just as a theory, I will say it’s possible that it could happen.
And I’ve seen—there have actually been instances of what anybody would call true, pure socialism, which were actually in some of these organizations in the 1960s and ’70s on the radical left, not the ones that my parents were involved in, but the biggest student movement group in the ’60s was Students for a Democratic Society, quite well known, very large. And they were known for having meetings—this is just within the group to make decisions—they were known for having meetings that lasted for days because that’s what it requires. Participatory, true participatory democracy, which is what socialism is, where every person actually has a say in every major decision, it takes an incredible amount of time and work. And so you have to actually devote your life to the collective, to the entity, to the socialist entity, to the state or to the organization, whatever it is that’s being operated or managed collectively. It requires all of the people within the collective, of course, to give over their own individual interests to the collective.
The Psychological Burden of Participatory Democracy [09:01]
Thaddeus Russell: Everyone should watch a documentary made by Naomi Klein, who’s a leftist who loves the idea of the collective ownership of property and worker management and socialism. And she did a documentary film called The Take about a factory in Argentina that was abandoned, essentially, by the owner, and the workers there took it over and managed it themselves as a workers’ cooperative or workers’ collective. And she interviews the workers, and they talk about how wonderful it is that now, at the end of their regular eight-hour shift on the factory floor, they have another four to six or sometimes eight hours of meetings to manage the factory. And she, Naomi Klein, and these workers thought this was wonderful. And I thought, well, okay, I mean, if working all day on a factory—in a factory—and then being a corporate manager for another eight hours is your idea of utopia, then there’s my argument against socialism. No thanks. I mean, if you want that, be my guest, but you’re never going to make me do that.
So that’s really the problem. It’s not actually that it’s top-down.
Bob Zadek: In your book, there’s this quote which is relevant to what you just said. You said in your book, “The founding fathers understood what we now choose to ignore: democracy is the enemy of personal freedom.” And you just now explained that, that when you have democracy, democracy requires you, in effect, turn over your individual decisions about your life to the, as Madison observed, the tyranny of the majority. That just because 51% of the people, the voters, if you will, decide you ought to do something or not do something, you have signed on to the principle that that determines what you’re going to do, which is the subordination of your personal freedom, your autonomy, to the 51%. I did a show about 10 years ago, and the title of the show was “What’s So Special About Majority Rule?” And you sort of summed it up better than I did in your book.
Thaddeus Russell: Well, they’re different arguments. Madison’s argument is different than mine. I mean, I think I agree with him on that particular point. And I agree with classical liberal arguments against democracy, which has to do with what you’re talking about, majority rule, the dictatorship of the majority. You know, why is it that 51% of my neighbors get to decide my life? Those are all good arguments. I completely agree with.
But I’m making a different one. I’m making an argument that it’s totalitarian in a different way, a different way. That it’s totalitarian psychologically. In other words, for there to be true democracy—another example, by the way, is the town halls in New England, town hall meetings. Of course, ask anybody who’s lived in Vermont for a long time who’s really been part of that, they’ll tell you they spend a huge amount of their life in those town hall meetings making decisions, studying things.
People complain all the time about how undemocratic Americans are, meaning that they just don’t care much, they don’t do much, they vote once every four years, maybe at best, and only half of them do that. So then the question is, okay, so what would it mean for Americans to be much more democratic? What would it mean for the United States to be radically democratic the way that socialists think it should be? Okay, so that means decisions—the government, the state, the people, which is the people, that’s what democracy is, government by the people. The people as a whole, all of them and individually, are responsible for everything, for every decision made.
In a truly democratic socialist political economy, what is produced by businesses, the products, is that’s a question for me and you and everybody, right? Whether there should be those products produced is a question for me and you and everybody. What does that mean? That means you and I, the first thing we have to do is start researching everything in the world because we have to make decisions about it. So it’s just an endless amount of work. The more democratic you are, the more work you’re going to do, the less of an individual you are, the less of a person you are. You’re no longer Thaddeus Russell, you are now a member of the polity, of the democratic polity. That’s what it requires. Even if you just make your neighborhood truly democratic, okay, well, that means that each person there must decide whether there’s a stop sign, a stoplight, whether they need to repave the road. There’s a million—there’s infinite decisions to be made even in the smallest jurisdiction. So if you make it totally democratic, everybody there will be working, studying, reading, planning, and meeting all the time. It just sounds like nothing but no fun.
Bob Zadek: It would be no fun at all. In fact, the book that I wrote summarizing some of my shows was Our Country Right Now Has, In My Opinion, and In the Opinion of I Think the Founders, Far Too Much Democracy. We are drowning in democracy to our collective detriment.
This is Bob Zadek. I’m speaking with Thaddeus Russell this morning. Thaddeus has written—is promoting his university, Renegade University. More about that after the break. Thaddeus has written A Renegade History of the United States, a very interesting and I think quite accurate spin on social and political history of our country. We’ll be back talking to Thaddeus in about one short minute. Please stay tuned. Lots more to follow, including the restructure of the American political system. A big burden, we’ll overcome it in one short minute.
[Commercial Break]
Modern Campus Puritanism [12:19]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in the country. Thanks so much for listening this Sunday morning to my conversation with Thaddeus Russell. Thaddeus has written A Renegade History of the United States, a must-read if you have only the teeniest curiosity about how we got to where we are today.
Thaddeus, welcome back to the show this morning. What’s interesting in what you’re explaining, life in Berkeley during the sort of somewhat of the end of the hippie culture, the countercultural movement, the hedonistic pleasures that were promoted in Berkeley and other places at the time. But what’s interesting is your generation, if you will, to some degree has now matured—and that’s maybe in quotes—and now they populate a large community that you are quite familiar with, which is college campuses. So here they are with this antecedent of the free speech movement, which preceded you in the early ’60s in Berkeley, and freedom and let people “do their own thing,” a somewhat hackneyed expression. And here they are now populating college campuses, and their attitude is profoundly different than those antecedents. You have had some direct experience on college campuses. Share that experience briefly with us if you will, and what in your opinion happened to those ideals that you described in your youth in Berkeley?
Thaddeus Russell: Well, I don’t know. So I think it’s true that the politics, the political discourse coming out of college campuses, in particular from students, by the way, is conservative. That it is, I think, the hysteria recently about sexual assault on college campuses and in particular the calls for reforms against sexual assault have been puritanical and obviously conservative. So there’s that.
But in my experience, what’s sort of not said publicly, the way that students lead their lives, what they do, is actually quite hedonistic still, just in different ways. And so I think kids I’ve taught at least—and I’ve taught at five different colleges and universities on both coasts, all of them elite schools—I think they spend a lot of time playing video games. I think they have a lot of sex. In fact, I know they do because STD rates on campuses are very high, higher than I think ever. They—I wouldn’t say they’re great proponents of the Puritan work ethic. I think they suffer from it like all of us, but I don’t think it drives them as much as it has previous generations. I think that they are far more tolerant of sort of alternative lifestyles than previous generations, even the hippie generation. You know, I think the trans movement is part of that.
So it’s kind of a mix. Now, the thing is that the politics, the political discourse, you’re right, coming out of them is highly puritanical. It’s a left-wing puritanism, right? It’s the idea that sex is dangerous and harmful no matter what, that women are vulnerable to sexual predation by men, that women need protection by institutions and the state, that there needs to be specific regulations about every sexual activity in a bedroom. You know, this is what’s been called for and actually put in place at many colleges, these consent rules. I mean, that’s all straight out of Victorian America. It’s straight out of Victorian America. I mean, it’s the most conservative set of ideas and policies you could have for women or for people generally.
So there is a very strange contradiction. Now, that’s the contradiction that I saw when I was in college in the 1980s, which was Antioch College, which was basically the Berkeley of colleges, very left-wing, radical, lots of anarchists and hippies and punk rockers and socialists and transgender people and gays and lesbians. Really hedonistic and libertine in the way that we lived generally speaking, which was wonderful. And but on the other hand, really fiercely, viciously puritanical sometimes. There’d be sort of outbursts of this, you know, when someone would be accused of being a racist or a rapist or a sexist, there would be this just sort of Salem witch trial-like atmosphere all of a sudden, and someone might get suspended or expelled or certainly ostracized.
So there’s just always these contradictions within people. And I think the contradictions are especially stark within Americans. Now, I also think this is true for Americans generally. I don’t think it’s just the weirdos that I hung out with when I was a kid and in college. I think Americans always have simultaneously within them a little Cotton Mather, the great Puritan minister, and a hedonist. You know, they’re always fighting against each other. When your alarm clock goes off in the morning, you have a fight between the two. I mean, I think the vast majority of us do. I think very few people are happy when their alarm clock goes off and it’s time to go to work. The vast majority of us in that moment struggle, and we have a struggle between the Puritan and the hedonist. The Puritan says get up and go to work, the hedonist says stay in bed.
So this is the eternal, constant civil war within us. And that’s the civil war I talk about on a social level in my book. So for the book, the subject of the book is essentially a 500-year battle between those who didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning and those who wanted them to get out of bed in the morning. The moralizers, the social guardians on the one hand, and the hedonists, the rabble, the motley crew, as John Adams called them, the drunkards, the laggards, the prostitutes, the slaves, the pirates, all those. That’s the civil war that’s been going on between those groups of people, but also as I said, inside each of us, I think.
And so the point of the book is not to say—and this is very important for people to understand—is not to say that we should have no rules and that we should have no governors or managers, social managers. I’m glad that there are certain people who want to do that work. I certainly don’t want to, you know, decide when the trash is picked up and who goes to jail. But I’m glad there are people who do that. I do think there has to be some social organization. It doesn’t have to be a state, but someone’s got to do that stuff, and I don’t want to do it. So I’m glad they’re around.
But generally speaking, in this country, those people have been very, very powerful. And it has been actually a very orderly, quite repressed in a lot of fundamental ways society ever since its founding. So the United States is not in any danger at all of devolving into anarchic chaos as far as I can tell, contrary to…
Authoritarianism v. Totalitarianism [15:18]
Bob Zadek: Well, I think it’s in danger—I think the danger is the opposite. And you have pointed out in many interviews you have given to others that there is a very interesting political split in this country, a very important split, not between blue and red or Democrat and Republican. That distinction is totally artificial. The real distinction, as you have pointed out, is between those who favor an authoritarian, a big brother, a powerful state controlling everything, and those who favor freedom. Authoritarian versus freedom. And the Democrats and Republicans mainstream are both enamored with, intoxicated in my opinion, with this heady power they can accumulate over the individual. And so the split is in both parties. There are those who recoil from authoritarianism and those who favor it because they think they know better. And that is really the split in this country rather than this phony Democrats and Republicans. There’s no such thing as a democratic philosophy or Republican philosophy. There are no philosophers who Democrats support and Republicans follow. No such thing. It is simply power on the one hand or freedom on the other. Isn’t that what’s happening? And it looks like, Trump being a reasonable example, that in the short run at the federal level, authoritarianism seems to be winning. It may be different at the state level, but at the federal level, authoritarianism seems to be on the rise. Or do you disagree?
Thaddeus Russell: It depends on how you define authoritarianism. So I like to use two terms. One is authoritarian and one is totalitarian. And for me, the difference is authoritarianism is blunt coercive rule, the use of blunt coercive, often physically violent power. And totalitarianism is the convincing of the people that they are responsible for society. It’s the convincing of the people to be good citizens. It’s getting them to psychologically invest in the nation-state.
So I think that Trump is more authoritarian than totalitarian because he’s got almost no one to agree with him, right? He has the entire national media pretty much, almost the entire national political establishment, all of academia, of course, completely hostile to him from the beginning. So America is not in any danger at all of going into fascism or totalitarianism. There are fewer Americans now who are invested in their country than ever before, which by the way, I think is one very nice byproduct of the Trump administration.
So he’s an authoritarian. Authoritarians tend to be dumb. They tend to try to control people simply by whipping them or imprisoning them or killing them. And that’s his impulse. Now, he hasn’t done much of that, I think mostly because he’s simply unable to. But you know, I think he has authoritarian impulses at least verbally, rhetorically. And he’s just completely ineffective, you know, because authoritarianism generally tends to be ineffective. It tends to cause revolts and rebellions and revolutions, and the king’s head tends to get chopped off if they’re too authoritarian.
The real, for me, the much bigger problem in this country is totalitarianism. And there’s never really—well, I’d say the New Deal was a pretty totalitarian era. I’d say McCarthyism in the 1950s was fairly totalitarian. So I’m not going to say this has ever been a truly totalitarian society, but there certainly have been moments when it’s been pretty close. That to me is, however, always has been a strong tendency in American culture. I mean, the Puritans, the founders of the culture really, were of course totalitarian. They made sure everybody was behaving properly and according to God’s rules all the time. And you had moral guardians of all kinds. Many of them were religious, Christian, and evangelicals for the first 200 years or so of America. Ministers, pastors, evangelicals, missionaries who would travel the country in the First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, telling Americans that they were sinners and giving them all the ways in which they could reform themselves immediately.
So and then, of course, after the Revolution, you had the rise of professional police, professional firefighters. You had the rise of asylums for wayward women and children. You had the rise of prisons. You had the rise of prisons in which the prisoners were monitored. They were watched. They were listened to rather than just put in a hole and left there. Then you also had the rise of democracy. This is, of course, after the Revolution. So we are now a democratic country, which means, as I’ve said before, it is a country by us, by the people. And so you actually see a shift in the culture. Now, fortunately, I’d say most Americans didn’t really buy into it, but a significant percentage did, did start talking about America as “me” or “I” or “us.” They began to identify with America. They became much more willing to volunteer for wars. The American Revolution, there were just a tiny handful of men who volunteered to fight on the side of the patriots. They had to resort to conscription almost immediately. Very few people know that. But after the Revolution, this democratic idea actually did get into the heads of a lot of men, never I’d say a majority, but always enough to fight wars.
Conscription and the “Popular War” Myth [20:32]
Bob Zadek: By the way, Thaddeus, one side note about the draft. You’re quite right, of course, that there always has been a draft. But there’s an interesting aspect of the draft both during the American Revolution and during the Civil War, is that if you were drafted as a young man, you were permitted to hire somebody to go in your place. And so that in effect, those who served in the army were not middle class, whatever middle class was in those days, or upper middle class. They just bought their way out. They hired somebody to serve for them. It was kind of an interesting aspect, little known about the draft. And that caused—there were riots during the Civil War because it was a poor person’s war. Rich people, middle-class people didn’t have to fight. So yes, we had a draft, but it wasn’t pure patriotism. In effect, it was a tax in a way, which wealthy people could pay and poor people would in effect not go to jail, but go to fight.
Thaddeus Russell: Right, yeah, this is true. I would say, though, that this is still the time when there’s a significant number of middle and even upper-class people volunteering. There’s a real democratic ethos—I’m not saying this is good, but there’s a real democratic ethos in America during the Civil War and even well into the 20th century. We don’t really have it anymore, but certainly then. I mean, if you look at a lot of the generals and a lot of the officers who lost their arms or legs, their heads in battles in the Civil War, those guys almost to a man came from well-established wealthy families. And you had quite a few middle-class guys just even enlist as regular soldiers during that war.
I mean, and so that, which is why 600,000 of them died and probably twice that many came home missing a limb or an eye. So that’s actually the ultimate product of democracy, by the way, is that you’re going to go to war and you’re going to kill and die most likely because that’s the ultimate commitment, that the ultimate democratic citizen is someone who’s willing to go to war for their country.
But yeah, so it—nonetheless, there has always been a significant minority who have resisted draft, conscription, and I document those in Renegade History and also the book I’m working on now, which is about the history of American foreign policy. And we, of course, don’t talk about the draft resisters, and if we ever, ever do, we still assume that they are shameful. And I’m trying to make them into heroes, in fact. To me, every single draft resister in this country’s history is a national hero, certainly my hero. They gave up everything.
Bob Zadek: Little known fact about the draft is, of course, probably the leading thinker in our country who helped us get rid of the draft was Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman spoke and wrote eloquently about the draft being a bad idea in terms of a political process and economic process. He abhorred the draft, and when he threw his considerable intellectual weight behind it, it helped us get rid of the draft.
Thaddeus Russell: Yeah, I think he said that it’s the worst thing a state can do. And it certainly—I wouldn’t disagree with that. I mean, it is—we need to talk about the draft for what it really is, which is enslavement. I mean, I don’t see any argument against it being enslavement. It’s temporary, I suppose, that’s the only argument you can make, but it’s still temporary enslavement. You are being forced by the state to risk your life, to put your life on the line. I mean, it’s enslavement. And it’s been in every war except the Iraq War. Every major war, there’s been a draft in this country’s history, which tells you something about how committed Americans have been to these wars. Now, in the Civil War, I said there was a pretty high level of commitment, but every since then, in the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II even—two-thirds, two-thirds of the soldiers who fought in World War II were conscripts. Korea, Vietnam, all depended, depended on drafts for them to happen. So whose foreign policy has it been? Whose wars have those been? Have those been popular “the people’s” wars? Hard to make that argument if they all depended upon a draft, enslavement, for them to happen.
Bob Zadek: I find the concept of a popular war to be kind of strange. It’s hard to put the word “popular” next to the word “war” and have it make sense.
Thaddeus Russell: Well, some wars have been popular. I mean, I think some countries, there have been countries where there were high rates of enlistment, voluntary enlistment, for certain causes for certain moments. I don’t think that’s been very common. By the way, I’ve been doing research on the World War II recently and realized that every single country that was involved in World War II, which was, I forget, but you know, dozens and dozens of countries, every single one of them had universal conscription throughout the war. Every single one of them. So World War II, in which 65 million people died, I don’t really think you can call that a popular war either. I don’t think you can call it a people’s war if every single army in it required enslavement.
Bob Zadek: A side note about conscription and the draft. Conscription was necessary because what’s the alternative? The alternative is you hire soldiers. Well, who are going to take the job of being a soldier? Those people who do not have a better economic alternative, which means it’s the lowest rungs on the economic ladder who will take that job because they cannot get any other job. So conscription assures, at least on paper, that rich people have to fight alongside poor people. And without conscription, you end up with massive social unrest because only poor people are fighting the battles.
Thaddeus Russell: Yeah, well, except that’s not true. That hasn’t—that’s exactly what’s not happened, right? So we’ve had a voluntary army since Vietnam, and it is, as you said, it is made up of poor or working-class people almost exclusively. But we had the last time we had a real anti-war protest movement was Vietnam. We don’t have one anymore, even though we have a volunteer army. So I don’t know. I mean, the idea of being, for me, the idea of being forced by the government to fight in a war that I oppose, I can’t, as Friedman said, I can’t imagine a worse thing. I can’t imagine something that—there’s very few things that would cause me to actually take up arms against my own country, but that might be the one thing. If they ever tried to force me to go fight in a war that I oppose, I think that’s when I actually go to the hills.
Obama and the Crackdown on Dispensaries [23:34]
Bob Zadek: Well, I’m glad we don’t have any draft anymore, because you’d be now a subversive, I’d be arrested for having you on my show, and we’d both be in a heap of trouble. So I’m relieved we have no draft, so you don’t get to actualize on your approach.
Thaddeus, we have only a few minutes left on the show. One conversation I’d like to have with you for a few minutes, which has always puzzled me, and I’m anxious to hear your opinion on it. We have about three or four minutes. One thing I never understood in the last administration, the Obama administration. Obama was sort of a child—I don’t mean a child when he was president, but he came from a very progressive background, think of it being having antecedents in Berkeley more or less. He was a student or a friend of Saul Alinsky. And so given that background, how can you explain—I’m asking you because you might have insights I don’t have—what explains Obama’s aggressive attack on drug dispensaries? What was going on? Why did he pick a fight with drug dispensaries in California which were lawful under California law? Drug policy is a pretty ugly policy in our country. Incarceration, it falls heavily on poor people and on blacks and other minorities. So that would seem to be something he took the exact opposite position from that which I would have predicted. Can you give us any insight because you have a unique perspective on what was going on? What accounted for that?
Thaddeus Russell: I don’t know. I mean, well, I have never seen any evidence of the decision-making. You know, I don’t know what Eric Holder and Barack Obama were saying in their meetings about this. I’m dying to know, but I’ve never seen anything. I’ve never seen any reporting on it either. So how he was thinking, how his administration was thinking about this is, as far as I know, not public record yet.
Yeah, so Barack Obama grew up fairly famously in Hawaii as a pot smoker. And then he went to Occidental College in Los Angeles, which was where I taught for a while, and was famous as a pot smoker there. And in fact, he might have even dealt pot when he was a student there, but certainly smoked it. And then, you know, he goes to Columbia Law School and decides to reform himself. This is all in his autobiography, by the way. Becomes ashamed of his—the way he had been living, changed his name from Barry to Barack, and has lived a fairly abstemious life except for the cigarette smoking ever since. You know, Barack Obama is the paragon of American discipline, right? He’s the perfect American citizen, isn’t he?
I think that’s part of it. I think that it’s a renunciation of his former self as a pot smoker. But I think more deeply, because this is really what the state has to do in a sense, I think he was disciplining local insubordination, state insubordination. Marijuana…
Bob Zadek: I think you’re right. It was the federal government…
Thaddeus Russell: Yeah, it’s federal versus state.
Bob Zadek: By the way, we’ve got to say goodbye to Thaddeus. Sorry, the network is telling us we’re done. Thaddeus, I want to thank you so much for giving us an hour of your time this morning. Good luck with the Renegade University. You can follow Thaddeus at thaddeusrussell.com. This is Bob Zadek saying so long for now. I’ll be back next Sunday with another live libertarian hour.