Alexander: Foreign.
Blair: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another episode of the Secular
Foxhole Podcast.
Today we're very fortunate to have a guest.
Alexander Marriott is a historian with a PhD in early American Political and Intellectual
History from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
He is the Department Chair of History at Alvin Community College in Alvin, Texas, directly
south of Houston, where he has been teaching US and Texas history since 2016.
Before that, he was Department Chair and Assistant professor of History at Wiley
College in Marshall, Texas.
He has published reviews, chapters and
articles with the Objective Standard, the Journal of the Earlier Republic, the Journal
of Southern History, the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Excuse me, and the
University of Tennessee Press.
His second in a series of detective novels is
to be published by the UK based Vanguard Press on June 26th.
Following the deadly adventures of transplanted Chicago native Virgil Colvin in
Greece, Murdered with a Glass of Malvasia will be available on all line bookselling on all
online bookselling platforms in the United States and the uk.
And if you're in the Houston area, Murder by the Book, one of the nation's premier all
mystery thriller bookstores Hello Alex hello.
Great to have you.
Alexander: Thank you.
Blair: The reason I wanted you on is because you and I are friends on Facebook and you
wrote a great just a simple paragraph that just eviscerates our political situation
today.
And if you would, I'd like you to read that
and then I'd have some questions for you about that.
Alexander: Sure, yeah.
Friends on Facebook.
The only place that matters.
Martin: So there are alternatives here.
It's Martin here, so we will talk about that
in the future.
But yeah, you're right.
Alexander: So shoot the all right, so here's what I wrote.
Despite the play for nostalgia built into the marketing of the MAGA movement, there's
nothing inherently American about it in the least.
It rejects the Enlightenment thinking of the Founding as fully as the Progressive movement
did and does, and all of the corollary policy prescriptions, constitutional commitments, and
the classical obsession with virtue, sobriety and reasonableness.
If I handed a MAGA platform to James Madison, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams,
Thomas Jefferson, or George Washington, they'd be annoyed, alarmed, and disgusted when I
showed them maga's leader in action.
They'd condemn MAGA for what it is, a
demagogic and unmoored pack of hyenas looking to pick clean the carcass of the Republic.
That the aforementioned progressives just as shamelessly led us to this point only to
recoil at the advent of MAGA hardly makes them heroes.
It only highlights their shameful and useless perfidy and hypocrisy.
Blair: Bravo, Bravo.
Now you argue that the mega movement diverges
sharply from Enlightenment ideals.
Let's unpack that with.
Can you name obviously some specific principles you believe are under threat and
why they're foundational to the American identity?
Alexander: So one of the interesting things about the enlightenment of the 18th century
and what makes it kind of special, and the fact that our revolution occurs in the midst
of that moment and our founding documents are written in that moment and sort of has kept
it's kind of a time capsule, the Enlightenment as part of our lives in some way for a couple
hundred years, well past the Enlightenment shelf life as a philosophical movement that
one could identify easily.
Right.
It used to be every thinker in the world was an Enlightenment thinker or aspired to be an
Enlightenment thinker for a good at least half century or more.
You couldn't, couldn't be hard to find Enlightenment thinkers today.
I mean, so one of the things that really makes that movement special, that I think MAGA has
no time for at all, is the notion of reason as the mechanism or the method by which all human
questions and all questions that humans have about non human things should be approached
and dealt with.
And so in the 18th century, you see this as a
sort of flowering of questioning the natural world and being willing to honestly go, not to
use Star Trek here, but where no man had gone before, in terms of being willing to ask some
very difficult questions, the answers to which could have very profound and disturbing
implications.
And some of those relate to what I think
people could probably easily anticipate.
The age of the world, for instance.
You know, one of the cool stories of the 18th century is kind of just discovering the age of
the earth through some fairly what seemed to us simple observations of things.
For instance, the presence of, of marine fossils on the tops of mountains and things of
that nature.
And of course, the beginnings of the
discoveries of dinosaur fossils and things like that, which implicated, again, kind of
disturbingly, that the, the notion of a biblical creation or an Earth that was several
thousand years old could be wildly off if one began to start looking at these things and ask
honest, unfearful questions rooted in, again, a kind of an approach to the world that was
grounded in reason and not one that was grounded in fear or superstition and things
like that.
So I think reason is probably the
Enlightenment's sort of greatest gift to itself, because these were people who were
really interested in their own present and how exciting it was to live in their own moment.
But it's also one of the greatest gifts to every.
Everybody who comes after them and sort of having a kind of unguilty devotion to the
power of the human mind to sort of figure these things out and ask these questions in an
honest, rigorous way and pursue the answers wherever they go.
And MAGA is, I think, like many postmodern movements, not wedded to that as an ideal in
any way.
And, you know, you can see the consequences of
this in the embrace of quite a number of what would normally be very fringe characters and
fringe ideas, and they become.
They become suddenly laudable or, you know,
ideas that we should really pay attention to because they're fringe.
Right.
And Blair, you and I were telling you a little
bit about this, you know, the sort of domination for a couple of generations of what
we.
What we might in shorthand just refer to as
the left, of a lot of cultural institutions in our society that pushed a lot of these figures
and ideas into the fringe with, I think, for a lot of them, good reason, because they were
pushed into the fringe by the left.
Everybody who gets pushed into the fringe by
the left is now equally valid.
Right?
So if Ayn Rand was pushed to the fringe by the left and so was this other insane person,
right.
They're both equally valid sort of people we
should pay attention to and.
And now have a regard for, because the left
did that to them.
That's not a rational approach to evaluating
ideas.
That's just sort of a. I don't like that group
of people.
And whoever they didn't like is now therefore
good.
That doesn't.
There's no attempt to evaluate on any kind of principle that would be.
And MAGA kind of basks in that kind of world.
Every idea, if it's an enemy of the left, will
be equally sort of considered.
It's how you get this kind of weird hodgepodge
of characters in the 2024 election that never would have gotten together before, at least
not under a Republican banner.
Right.
How does Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. And some of these other fairly peculiar figures advance
into our midst and become part of the same team?
Right? Again, it's kind of just this sort of the
gravitational pull of power or the promise of power, not a rational process that says, hey,
RFK Jr. Was shunted into the fringe because he developed some grand theory that could be
easily proven with scientific fact.
Right.
I think he's having a difficult time trying to present ideas back with scientific fact now,
which is why you had this very peculiar scandal of AI generated science that
elucidated footnotes and studies and things like that.
And in the past, that would have been a debilitating, horrifying scandal.
And of course, I'm reminded of.
Blair: Or just laughed out of it.
Yeah, just laughed off the stage.
Yeah.
Alexander: And of course you get the what about asm?
Well, yeah, that happened to Joe Biden.
Right.
He was laughed out of politics in a serious way for.
For stealing a bunch of speech lines from a British labor politician.
And some you live long enough, you come, you may, you survive it.
Now, in Biden's case, it took, what, 40 years to survive that MAGA has truncated the
survival half life of these scandals to almost nothing, especially if it's Donald Trump that
we're talking about.
So I think the rejection of reason is pretty
easy to see in almost every aspect of maga in terms of the policy prescriptions, in terms of
the approach to politics, in terms of figuring out what ideas to suddenly vaunt forward.
And I think that's the most obvious way in which the Enlightenment's rejected some of the
other ways I hinted at in the post itself.
Right.
If we're talking about an Enlightenment era politics, which is where our revolution is
rooted and where our constitutionalism is rooted, then we're talking about a politics
that as much as possible is kind of trying to apply reason to all the sort of classical
political questions to figure out, how do you divide power?
You know, is it, is it just a convenience that we divide power?
Or is there actual, really sound, philosophically very profound ideas that go
behind the reasons why we divide power? Why do we have this separation of power and
checks and balance? And why should the people in the different
branches value that? Right.
Why, if you're in Congress, why should you value that the courts can check you?
Why should you value that the president can veto something that you do?
And if you're the President, why should you value that you have to work with Congress,
that Congress has a bunch of really important powers that you don't have, and you need to
persuade them, or the public needs to persuade them, or the courts have a very compelling,
valid reason to step in and say, even though you all wanted that to happen and it's very
popular, it's still actually illegal and you can't do that, or it violates the rights of a
very unpopular group of people or just one person.
Those are really important ideas that are rooted in our Enlightenment political
philosophy that is still with us, thankfully, through this notion of constitutionalism,
which again, is kind of a. An important Enlightenment concept, not that it's invented
in that moment, but it's sort of brought.
Blair: It flourished.
Alexander: I think it brought to its apogee.
Right.
The whole idea of we have to have this kind of a classical idea in a lot of ways, the sort of
mythical way in which the.
I shouldn't say mythical.
It's got some good archaeological finds supporting it, but this idea that the Greeks
would sort of write down or chisel in stone, literally the laws of the city and they would
always be there.
You could always see that they were there.
So if somebody came along and said, well, the law is not this.
They say it's.
It's literally.
I'm looking at it.
It's right there.
Blair: There it is.
Yeah.
Alexander: You can't tell me that this is.
That this is legal, right.
That.
That all that stuff which kind of glibly just
gets brushed aside today by maga.
And I'm not, I don't.
I don't want to let the left off the hook here because as I pointed out in the post, right.
That this is all kind of predicated on, you know, Wilsonian era progressive legal thinking
that did the same thing that sort of shunted all of these things aside.
Right.
Blair: They are MAGA and the progressives are philosophically aligned even.
Even if it's allegedly on the surface are the.
Alexander: Are the same.
And again, the sort of just glib way that our
established institutional norms are sort of swept away as no longer relevant, with very
little argumentation provided as to how that could possibly be true or why that would be at
all safe strikes me as very similar.
Both of them had no ability to foresee
eventually losing to anybody else.
Right.
Because that's sort of the most obvious reason why you would sort of point out, well, hey,
even in the short term, this is a bad idea.
You're giving a lot of power to all of your.
To this other side that you claim is existentially evil and will destroy whatever
is left of the Republic.
Why would you give them all of these tools to
make it so easy? And.
And there's no answer to that.
It's a total blank out.
I haven't been able to fish out an answer in that real world that we call Facebook where
you saw this post.
So that.
That ends up being something else that I. That I think is.
Is pretty important.
It's funny, I was reading this again in
anticipation of this interview, and I list off this whole cast of worthy revolutionary
characters, but perhaps the most important person for sort of giving people, I think, a
real shorthand for figuring out why MAG is so not really American, at least in the sense
that we think about it as we near 4th of July.
Here is Franklin.
Franklin is as curious and brutally honest a character as there really is in the American
Enlightenment.
Willing to call people out, willing to call
himself out when he's wrong, change his ideas when he realizes he's made a mistake.
Again, kind of always curious, constitutionally curious on things that you
would think a man with his background and education and profession wouldn't care a whit
about.
And yet he never stopped himself from sort of
curiously entering these other fields, asking questions, doing it with some bravado, but
ultimately sort of knowing that at the end of the day, if he was going to have anything to
offer, it was going to have to be rooted in value.
He was going to have to offer the goods, something that other people found interesting
because they could do it or they could see it themselves.
And most of all, of what we remember of Franklin's career.
And I talk to students all the time about Franklin because we always.
I always force them to read the autobiography.
So before we do that, I'd do a little.
Let's talk about the guy on the $100 bill.
What do we know about Frank?
Martin: Him in.
Alexander: And of course, because he's on the $100 bill, there's always some assumption he
was president at some point.
I said, nope, for president.
He's one of the few people not to hold that office on our currency.
And then they all remember the kite, right? The experiment with the kite.
Blair: That's it.
Alexander: And it's funny that he's remembered Fed, but it's also great because if you had to
go to Franklin and sort of dig him up and he was fine, and you could say, hey, talk to you
for a few minutes, everyone remembers you and be like, great, that's fun.
Why? And he said, well, you're on our hundred
dollar bill.
Okay, that's lovely.
And then he said, everyone knows about your kite experiment.
He'd be, of course, **** kite.
Because it kind of took over his reputation
for a while in the 18th century, too.
It's kind of funny he'd be interested to know
it just had persisted as the thing to remember him for.
But Franklin is this sort of undonald Trump character, as you could think of.
And I know that might sound surprising to some people because on the surface, Franklin does
sort of seem like he'd be this great reality show kind of media maven, right?
A person who knows how exactly the cameras would be pointed at him.
A person who knows exactly how to Play crowds and schmooze.
And he has this womanizing reputation that sort of fits our expectations for Donald Trump
and all the rest.
Somebody who fits in very well in 18th century
Late Royalist Paris.
But Franklin is this sort of inveterate
reader, right? And if you know anything about Donald Trump,
he reads nothing.
He reads the newspaper, he reads social media
posts, but he reads no books.
And that always strikes me as a very odd
characteristic for a person who's going to do anything big now I guess for a professional
athlete or, you know, God, somebody who's, who's already trained in whatever field
they're in and is now just doing it all the time and it's taking up all their, all their
moments like a, like a neurologist or an oncologist or some sort of surgeon of some
sort or I don't know, some sort of researcher.
I don't know.
Peculiar to have to have no reading in American presidents.
The only one I know that has that there's such a good literature about them not being a
reader, and I mean modern presidents, is Franklin Roosevelt.
And in a lot of ways I see both of them as pretty analogous to each other.
And I know that'll strike people as odd, especially fans of Franklin Roosevelt, but
they're both very mercurial.
They're both these New Yorkers that don't
really read.
They listen and talk to lots of people,
unofficial people outside of the government.
They don't really like all these official
government types.
Now Roosevelt, of course is sort of the anti
maga because he was talking to people at Columbia, a bunch of academics who had no
government posts, who were feeding him ideas and information.
I'm sure they would have recommended books, but I think they knew him well enough that he
wouldn't read them.
So in that respect it's quite different.
Right, Frank? The sort of unofficial cabinet that Trump
surrounds himself with is Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and some of these other
characters.
But, but it's very unfranklin like, right?
If it's very un.
Enlightenment, right.
I'm anti intellectual obsessed not with reading for its own sake.
They wanted to learn.
They wanted to learn things that were of
practical value in the world they lived in.
So it's not that they would turn down a novel
and novels were just kind of starting to become a widely read literary form in that
moment, but they really, if you go through their libraries, are reading about farming,
which many of them were engaged in farming.
So this was a practical necessity to read
about the latest scientific discoveries for good agriculture and that led to some real
developments at some of these large estates that some of them owned.
You know, they changed what they were doing and in kind of profound ways that had other
consequences that we don't necessarily think of.
For instance, Washington, employing some of these things he was reading, changed his
tobacco plantations that he was inheriting to wheat farms.
And because he made a commitment not to break up slave families without their consent, he
ends up with a giant amount of slaves that ends up becoming, at least in some parts, free
after his death or after the death of his wife.
So these decisions have.
Or these readings have some kind of profound
implications in other ways that we don't necessarily think of at all when we think
about these practical reads.
Of course, Franklin's reading, as he tells us,
to become a better writer, right? So he's going to find who sort of asks around,
who's the great writer? Who should I be reading to see a good writer?
And so they give him some names.
He says, all right, I'm going to go read them
and I'm going to write.
I'm going to practice writing as if I'm them,
Right? I'll write about something today, but I'll do
it in the style of Joseph Addison or one of these other people.
So the reading to learn, the reading to get better.
They're reading to broaden their horizons, to learn things.
And these are grown men.
These are not always young boys.
We're talking about people in their 30s, their 40s, their 50s, their 60s.
One thing that always kills me about the long correspondence of John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson is that in their retirement, I think it's Adams, but it could be Jefferson.
One of them starts learning classical Greek.
They really start working on classical Greek
as their kind of obsession to master it better from way back when they were in college or
William and Mary or Harvard, or where those two guys went to school.
But sort of working on.
I've never been comfortable with how well I
mastered classical Greek.
So really working on reading Aristotle and the
original classical Greek so that I can sort of work on this more.
And it's sort of.
It's kind of laughable to think about it in
today's context, because who in our politics reads Aristotle, let alone attempts to do it
in classical Greek, or it would even consider this a worthwhile use of their time.
Blair: Nobody.
Alexander: And no, I couldn't think of a. I couldn't think of a single one.
I mean, I'm not saying they need to be.
I'm not saying they need to be.
Blair: Well, that's it wouldn't hurt.
Alexander: It wouldn't hurt.
It wouldn't hurt.
But I'm saying in the sense that who has that type of mind?
Who would even.
Who's reading to learn to get better, to get
practical wisdom.
And that's really what the Enlightenment is
about.
Right.
How do we achieve practical wisdom in all aspects of life to make our society more
civil, to make our government more rational, to make it possible to protect rights and have
a rule of law and self government in a way that no people before this moment, moment in
the 18th century has been able to pull off for more than either a generation or within a very
small geographical space that obviously has no applicability to the American experiment.
And those sorts of.
Let me get back to being, being off on its own
path and not really, you know, this idea of making America great again or where
everything's America this, America that.
Sure, I guess a notion of America, but it's
definitely one rooted in the 20th century in a post New Deal America versus America, as I
think a lot of people on Facebook are thinking about it, who've thrown themselves into Maga,
who are sort of thinking about the 18th century revolution, the Constitutionalism, but
they're not in a movement, I think that really actually cares about that too much.
And I think Vice President.
Blair: Or they're against that or against.
Alexander: Yes, of course.
I think Vice President Vance has been pretty
openly honest about not not being for it and perhaps being quite against it.
Right.
Talking about Caesar and the need for a Caesar
at this point, or Americans wanting a Caesar, which would have been interesting talk to, to
America's founders because they were, they were always kind of worried that such a
character would emerge.
Blair: I know, I know.
I mean most mega people, their life is
centered around the Bible and they don't anything else.
They don't study anything else.
But anyhow.
Alexander: Well, if it was Jefferson's Bible, that's another great little part of the
Enlightenment I always like to tell students about.
When Jefferson decides to slice and dice the Bible, it takes out all the miracles and all
the impossible things that couldn't have happened.
What's he left with Jesus's sermons?
Blair: Well, speaking of the founders, if they were, if they were around today, what do you
imagine their response would be to contemporary populist movements?
And how would they assess the current state of American constitutionalism?
And here we, you know, we continue that conversation.
Alexander: I think they, I think they'd, they'd see it in broad historical terms.
I mean, and I think, yeah, there's no originality Here, lots of people have said
this, and I think it's fallen on many deaf ears because nobody, I mean, quite frankly, I
don't think the people in MAGA care about these ideas or the trajectory of things or
even if they ended up there.
I think J.D. vance is onto something when he
suspects openly that there are a lot of people clamoring for Caesar, for some dictatorial
character who can set things right.
Now, in the Roman period, which would be the
period they would think of, of course, the idea of a dictatorship was a legal
institution.
It was built into Roman constitutionalism as a
temporary way to fix the Republic.
We don't have that for a variety of reasons.
Now, of course, in the Roman case, we know it ends up poorly at the end of the day because
it doesn't remain temporary, which of course is what gets Julius Caesar killed.
And I would argue rightfully so.
But I'm not here to argue the pros and cons of
assassinating Julius Caesar.
But the, but I think they would see it in that
context.
They would see it in the context of a late
stage republican imperial moment where the citizens.
Right, the, in Rome's case, it was of the city itself.
But the citizens of the Republic are clamoring to hold on to as much of what they see as a,
as a sort of fragile pie for themselves as they can.
And they're willing to follow leaders who promise them the ability to do that.
That's how I, that's how I sort of interpret the angst surrounding immigration.
A lot of people will see it purely in racial or cultural terms.
I think a lot of that is fairly an easy way for MAGA to sort of play on some of those
fears that are out there.
Martin: No doubt they're still called proud boys.
Alexander: Yeah, yeah.
But I think the one thing that strikes me
every time I talk to anybody who's really that concerned about it, it always drifts back to
this sort of, well, they're taking all of our stuff, you know, jobs or entitlement benefits
or healthcare services or educational services or tax dollars and things like that.
And that almost seems to me to be the more universal concern as opposed to.
I hate Guatemalans.
You know, I don't know how many people are out
there who hate Guatemalans.
I guess there are probably some, but whatever
nationality you want.
Yeah, but it seems more the, the, the supposed
threat to the bread and circuses that we have here.
You know, someone who can promise me more of that bread and circus and keep it for me.
And I think that's the way in which Most of those 18th century figures would have.
Would have looked at things because they're so imbued with.
With those stories as a. As a background to their own fears about whether or not they
could successfully build a republic.
That for them, you know, it's kind of the way
they viewed.
Ended up viewing Aaron Burr, right?
Aaron Burr becomes kind of a stalking horse for this classical boogeyman, Catiline, right?
So that Hamilton will call him a cataline or an embryo Caesar, right?
He'll use these kinds of terms to talk about Aaron Burr, which from our perspective is
just, okay, what is that supposed to mean? But for them, in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries, calling someone cataline, everyone read that story.
They knew who Katalin was, how dangerous he could be to a republican form of government.
And so I think for them it would be easy to sort of say, okay, so we're looking at the
United States in 2025.
There's lots of fantastic, interesting things.
But it seems to us, right, you have the Gracchi brothers here and you have over there
a Caesar character, right? People promising these things and who are sort
of whipping up the masses to get themselves elected and then have to deliver, right.
It's the sort of real negative downside of populism, right?
You whip people up to get you thrown into office and then you have to deliver for them
or they'll throw you out.
Blair: Or words.
I know this one.
The comment that really made me just laugh out loud was your depiction of MAGA as, quote,
demagogic and unmoored pack of hyenas, unquote.
What rhetorical or political tactics do you see them driving this characterization?
What do you.
I mean, other than the people themselves.
Alexander: I guess I was gonna.
Well, I was gonna say all the, all the main
figures of maga, Right.
You know, some of them, I guess, are wedded to
systems of ideas.
And maybe Bannon fits that mold.
I think his system of ideas is wildly bizarre and Atlantonesque, I think.
Yeah, he's.
Well, I mean, I think he lends himself into
this kind of weird radical Catholic faction of almost Mussolini type characters in terms of
just the nation predominates amongst all and its blood, its culture.
And, you know, he went to Germany.
Martin: And helped the alternative for Germany.
Alexander: Yeah, yeah.
And that's not surprising.
I don't think that's at all surprising.
And that.
That's his milieu, right? Those are the characters he's comfortable with
and is appealing to in Orban and Hungary.
That these are kinds of people Swirling around
the same soup, as it were.
And I guess that that's an ideology.
And this.
Some of these other bizarre characters who are
kind of calling openly for dictatorship or.
And things like that.
It kind of fits an idea system.
But for the most part, you sort of see in, in
Trump the appeal of the.
The unmoored guy, right?
This is a person who probably has some fixed ideas.
The tariff and protectionism thing seems to stretch back his whole life.
But Donald Trump would just as soon as, you know, kill you as be your political ally.
I mean, this is a guy that will flake out on his friends or supposed friends as easily as
promote them.
And I think there's just a. Especially if you
sort of look at the trajectory of his whole first term, and I think in the second term,
we're going to see that play out as we move along as well.
You know, all these people that he, that he said, these are the greatest people I've ever,
I've ever had these.
I've hired the greatest people that are
available.
They're the best.
The geniuses.
They're all of them, my best friend, you know,
and then six months later, no, the guy's an idiot.
Martin: Elon Musk.
Blair: Yeah.
Alexander: Yeah. Of course, Musk has groveled his way back.
It's one of the first times I've seen any of these breakups where the person actually
grovels his way back in.
And because he's so, you know, for all the
talk of Elon Musk as some sort of visionary businessman, you know, he has sought rents at
the trough of the, of the government for all of these businesses.
I think he realized that if there was ever a vindictive bone in Donald Trump's body and he
really wanted to stick it to him, it'd be pretty easy.
So I'm not surprised the groveling occurred.
I guess he was just lucky that whole, that
whole brouhaha in LA broke out and gave him a reason to suddenly say, hey, remember.
I remember why I loved MAGA so much.
And Donald Trump is the best.
So the unmoored part, I think it's fairly, fairly easy.
Trump especially, just floats around ideas and picks and chooses and grabs a hold of people
and things and casts them aside just as easily for whatever serves him.
Blair: Let me say this, I mean, most of these people, and I won't put Trump in that
category, but they're all Christian nationalists.
In other words, America is a Christian nation and no one else should live here.
Alexander: Or if you do, you better accept that that's the reality.
You know whether you like it or not.
Yeah, you can have your weirdo aberrant age to
this.
That was always Bill O'Reilly's shtick when he
was on the O'Reilly Factor was so pointing out the Judeo Christian roots of the United
States.
And yeah, you could belong to these other
groups but you had to, you had to respect that the country was still Judeo Christian.
That's like a thing wherever.
Martin: I have a question because you wrote an article about 20 years ago and what's going on
in Iran.
And I remember didn't Dr. Peacock went to the
show and O'Reilly had a fit there and didn't had a problem having a discussion there.
He really tried to cut him off because Dr.
Pikov, Leona Pikov, he said what they should
do with the terrorist regime and the supporter of terrorism.
Alexander: That's so long since I've seen that.
But I don't doubt it.
Martin: Yeah. So do you have any now we continue with Blair's questions, but do you
have any thoughts about that, what's going on now in Iran and how Israel is doing?
Very precisely take them out and what will be the MAGA and Trump's role then?
Could Israel trust what's going on or will it be a so called diplomacy and bargain or flip
flopping and so on.
But we saw like the Bushes and others did back
in the day.
Alexander: Well, Trump's instinct seems to be to do just that, to flip flop and bargain and
negotiate.
I mean his whole brand is that he's some sort
of epic deal maker who can get out of any problem with his own charming ability to make
a deal.
I always liken it to the Ellis character in
Die Hard who tries to make a deal with Hans Gruber to get this whole thing settled and to
get John out of the building and making problems.
And it ends up getting Ellis, of course shot in the head at the end of that negotiation.
That's always who he reminds me of, that kind of like that 80s guy who would do that.
And that's I have to think that at the end of the day that's definitely where he prefers to
be.
Now Bannon, of course, who definitely doesn't
want to do anything related to Iran in this moment, is predicting that Donald will fly the
coupe on this one, that he will throw in in some way with the Israelis this weekend.
So we'll see.
I don't have any insights on that.
I have ideas about what we should do and I think they've been pretty consistent since
September 11, 2001.
And here we are, 25 years later.
So you could tell how much sway I've had on the powers that be.
But I have friends, I have family in both countries, actually.
And it's.
It's a real tragedy that the government in
Iran has made this, its sort of guiding principle for 30 or 40 years in terms of
pursuing some kind of nuclear program that, unlike all the civilian programs on the
planet, requires an incredible amount of highly enriched uranium and a ballistic
missile program and a bunch of terrorist flunkies spread out all over the world.
Yes, but no, none of us should be concerned that this program exists.
I mean, it's a bizarre.
The idea that we're having this conversation.
We're like, well, where's the proof that they're trying to do this?
And I said, well, at some point, you sort of have to just open your eyes to the facts that
are easily publicly verifiable and then look at what they add up to.
Because best I could tell, they don't add up to anything good.
You don't have to like Bibi Netanyahu to come to that conclusion.
I think what's been interesting to me watching this is just how clear and fairly unequivocal
the Germans have been with the Iranians and the IAEA has actually been in terms of just
saying we think they're pretty dishonest, actually, about how they've been doing this
and not really living up to what they told us they were doing.
And they're kind of in violation of all the laws that they've agreed to follow related to
having a nuclear program.
Blair: Well, that's why Israel acted, because the aaa, is it iea, whatever.
Alexander: Y.
Blair: They said, hey, these people, they're, you know, they're crooks, they're liars.
Alexander: Unanimously. So. And yeah, of course it's a.
Blair: And so Israel said, okay, that's.
That was our key.
Let's go.
Alexander: And I mean, the first.
The first strike.
I mean, where there was two exchanges before this right of.
Of strikes between Iran and Israel.
And the first one was launched by the
Iranians, you know, in response because they didn't like that a bunch of their terrorist
guys were blown up in Lebanon who were meeting for plotting with Hezbol in a very precise.
Yes.
Just to team up to strike the Israelis.
Like, the Israelis were just blowing up the random Iranians in various spots for no
particular reasons.
It's sort of kind of a joke.
So the fact that they launched a ballistic missile attack, huge ballistic missile attack,
that first attack was.
Was pretty large.
And, you know, The Israelis.
Is that supposed to lessen the Israeli concern
about an Iranian nuclear program? I don't see how that's possible.
So I think that the.
Aside from the general problem created for the
Israelis by October 7, in terms of being surrounded by people that would do things like
that, Iran certainly didn't prevent this particular war by deciding that they were
going to react to getting caught, which is what happened in Beirut with direct missile
launches at the Israelis.
I think that was a big miscalculation, and I
think it's.
Unfortunately for the people on the ground
there, it's, you know, who aren't involved in any.
In any of the IRGC's activities.
It's.
It's coming home.
Blair: All right, Alex, for maybe our last question, I wanted to.
And we touched.
We touched on it before we actually started
recording.
Given your critique of MAGA and the
progressives, where do you see hope for reinvigoration of classical liberal values in
modern American politics, if at all?
Alexander: Well, obviously right here, Blair.
Right here.
No, things like this are important.
I mean, yes, they are.
I'm not trying to be glib about it, actually.
I think, you know, the more that we talk and
write about it, the more that we make everyone aware that there are alternative ideas, there
are other ways of interpreting events than the ones that we see in the.
Is the predominant narrative in the universities, or the predominant narrative on
the news media, or the predominant narrative with MAGA or on X or on whatever the AI du
jour is.
Right.
That there are other explanations for the phenomena around us.
I think.
I think those people who are confused or who
are sort of told by one of these groups, hey, this thing that you can see with your eyes
that isn't true is actually definitely true.
I think those people who are intellectually
curious and honest, but who don't know about some of these other things can only be helped
by having more voices out there to discuss it, to talk about it.
Because, Blair, I haven't seen you on any of the big news channels recently.
And so these big panel discussions end up just being, you know, hey, instead of having those
two voices, we have four voices saying the same thing the two voices said before.
Blair: Well, to toot our own horn for a second, we are in the top 10 of the secular
podcasts in the country.
Alexander: That's awesome.
That's awesome.
And things like that.
I think things like that are important.
I know you're coming up on the big hundredth hundredth anniversary show, and that's great.
I mean, that means you've got 100.
Blair: Has the statistics, but I think we're downloaded in like, 90 countries.
They have downloads in, like, 90 countries.
So.
Alexander: And I haven't plugged my.
Blair: Having some impact somewhere.
Martin: What do you say?
Blair: Any money? But, you know, it's okay, though.
But did I lose everybody?
Martin: No, you're okay.
We hear you loud and clear.
Blair: But, yeah, I mean, that's quite an accomplishment, quite an achievement to be in
the top 10 of secular podcasts in the country.
Alexander: I think so.
I think so.
And, you know, there are people out there in both in academia, in the media that are
bringing interesting conversations to the fore who are being contrarian to these predominant
narratives, and I think that's really important.
Tara Smith, I think, is still at the University of Texas, and that is a tremendous
achievement for someone who has such a, I think, very contrarian take on legal
interpretation and jurisprudence, but a really, really wise and needed one.
And I think stuff like that is happening more than we give credit for, because we're all
stuck in the sort of fire hose of the news cycle and just sort of.
And, you know, and in these social media bubbles where a lot of voices are just
amplified for a variety of reasons that say or do really bizarre, strange things, and you
sort of think, oh, my God, everyone in the country believes that.
And then you go out into the country and talk to people, you don't find a lot of people who
are just willing to admit to your face, oh, yeah, I believe that.
You know, whatever that.
So let me, let me, let me.
Blair: Throw this out at you real quick, though.
One of the things that scares me that's under the radar is this.
I mean, basically what Trump's team is doing to the rule of law, I mean, there's some
things that are in this big, beautiful bill that just rip to shreds any individual
recourse to challenge the government.
And that is extremely frightening.
I mean, today he's rounding up Venezuelans, tomorrow it'll be atheists, you know.
Alexander: Yeah, the Venezuelan thing is so bizarre.
You have a bunch of people who fled what traditionally would be an American adversary
state, communist dictator.
We would normally say, hey, great, we get all
these people and we've.
No, no, no, we don't want them either.
Again, all the talk of 1930s parallels.
I mean, that'll be one that is interesting
because it kind of parallels this, right? The fleeing Jews of Europe couldn't find any
place to go, even in the United States.
And again, fdr, circling back to calling back
to these previous things that have already mentioned, although I didn't necessarily
intend to make that callback.
But yeah, the, the assault on the rule of law,
the idea that a republic is supposed to be an empire of laws and not of men.
Right.
We're right back at the one of those
Enlightenment values that was so important in the 18th century as a defining characteristic
of the kind of self government that we wanted to have.
Right.
The one that would not be subjected to the
whim of a single officeholder.
And yeah, there is some stuff in that
supposedly beautiful bill that makes it much more difficult for citizens to seek redress in
the courts without having to go all the way to the Supreme Court, which is a crazy desire
because getting a case to the Supreme Court is really improbable and super expensive.
And all of these people in MAGA who are, oh, we need to make sure those **** district
courts never get in President Trump's way again.
It's okay.
All right.
But when it's President Bernie Sanders Jr.
You're not going to be able to get to the
Supreme Court, kiddo.
That district court that could have helped you
is not going to have any power to intervene.
And that's just the start of your, what should
be your intellectual problems with this bill.
But, yeah, nobody thinks more than two steps,
two steps ahead of where they are.
It's very strange.
Blair: Yeah, well, there's, again, they're setting, you know, you think you're avenging,
you know, your side by doing this.
Well, the other side, when the other side gets
back into power, they'll just use what you gave them to.
Alexander: They'll use it and they'll use the argument you made to do it.
And they'll quote you.
They'll say, look, don't, don't take my word
for it.
Donald Trump.
Blair: Trump said this.
Alexander: Yeah, and you love Donald Trump.
So, hey, and so one, one basic question.
Yeah, I'm sorry, go.
Blair: I'm sorry, One, one basic question, then we should wrap this up.
What's the, There's a basic elementary history question.
What's the difference between a republic and a democracy?
Alexander: Ah, no, I did write an article about that 20 years ago.
Blair: Okay.
Alexander: So it's interesting in, in classical terminology, a democracy is a
government by everyone meeting together.
And so in an ancient city state, all the
citizens would meet together to govern.
Now, did this happen in ancient Athens?
It was very difficult to actually get all the citizens together at one time, but they made
attempts at getting groups of them together at various moments for different functions of the
Athenian state.
And voting, of course, was quintessential to
making the Decisions and casting those votes and counting them and letting the simple
majority rule, right? And of course, there are many famous examples
of this.
The trial of Socrates and the execution of
Socrates, right? Being decided by a jury of 500.
And they didn't have to reach unanimity, it was just a majority vote.
So democracy, this word that comes to us from the Greeks is that the people rule directly.
And elements of our government, of course, still retain that idea.
A republic, this Latin innovation from the Romans, getting a good definition of it is
trickier, but an easy way to think about it.
A couple of defining characteristics.
One would be the idea of representation versus having all the citizens together at any given
moment to make decisions.
So representatives now become an important
intermediary in making the decisions, right? They will get together and have a slower, more
methodical, more reasoned process, in theory, to make decisions.
In the Roman case, we see that happen in a variety of different, different groups being
represented, right? So the Senate would represent the old families
and aristocratic wealth of the Roman state.
Eventually there would be these other offices
to represent the people of the city who didn't really have too much in the way of property.
The tribunes would be.
Those consuls would eventually be added to
sort of represent an executive branch function out of the Senate itself.
And so, and you'd have two of them, so you wouldn't have one of them gain too much power
at any particular moment.
So republic is going to be defined by that
representative principle, the idea that we're not going to rule on everything as a group of
citizens, we're going to delegate that authority off to some other representative
group.
And the other function that Adams, I thought
had summed up, and I think I quoted him earlier, was this idea of law, that law
becomes supreme.
It's not a person, it's not an office holder,
it's the law itself.
And if you could have a society where the law
itself remained rooted in reason and it remained the authority over the whims of
individual characters, then you could have, hopefully for a long time, but you could have,
at least in that moment, a republic, an empire of laws and not of men.
So representation and law, I would say as the rule, are the defining characteristics, at
least as, as defined in the Classical and Enlightenment periods.
Blair: That's great.
Thank you, Alex. Where can people find you on
the web?
Alexander: If type my name into Google, you'll find a whole bunch of.
Whole bunch of things.
I had a long standing blog where I talked a
lot about politics and current events.
I haven't really updated that in a while.
I think maybe the 2020 election is probably the last time I made a remark.
Which is interesting because lots of things have happened since then.
Martin: You could do some guest blogging on the secular foxhole.
Oh, right there.
Alexander: I'm an idea.
I guess.
I guess that'd be great.
Yeah.
That'll hit much more people than my old.
My old blog I'm doing, as was mentioned, the
intro, I've been doing some fiction writing, so if you Google me now, you'll see lots of
links to the two detective novels I've published and the little blog I run to promo
those books.
Blair: Okay.
Martin: Okay, that's great.
And hopefully we could talk more about that in
the future.
Alexander: I'm available if you want to talk detective novels.
I'll be more than happy.
Martin: Yeah, we have some others that we have been talking about with that recently, so that
could be a good combination.
Alexander: I think that's right.
Andy Bernstein published a detective novel a
little different than mine.
It's a little prettier, A little more of a
Mickey Spillane vibe going on in that.
Right?
Blair: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
All right.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, we've been talking to Alexander Marriott, author and historian.
Alex, thanks for manning the foxhole with us today.
Alexander: It was my pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Martin: Thanks, Alex.
Alexander: Thank you.
Blair: Sam.