The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture

FORDHAM CENTER ON RELIGION AND CULTURE What Rules America: Money, Morals or Myth?

February 1, 2012 Fordham University | Lincoln Center Campus Pope Auditorium | 113 West 60th Street

Moderator E.J. Dionne, Jr. Georgetown University, Brookings Insitution and the Washington Post

Panelists Robert Kuttner Author, The Squandering of America and Everything for Sale

Robert A. George New York Post

Susan Jacoby Author, The Age of American Unreason, Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age and Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

JIM MCCARTIN: My name is Jim McCartin, and I am a co-director of the Center on Religion and Culture, along with Peter and Peggy Steinfels. We are pleased this evening to be hosting a three-way debate: What Rules America: Money, Morals, or Myth? We’re grateful that you made the decision to join us.

Before we go any further, let me ask you please to turn off your cell phones and other electronic devices, and let me alert you that the cards and pencils on your seats are for your questions. Please formulate them at any point during tonight’s event, then hold them up and one of our assistants, who are arrayed along the side, will pick them up and take them up front. Be certain, I ask you, to write legibly and succinctly so that we can actually make use of your questions, which are always an important part of our events.

When you saw the format for tonight’s event, perhaps you sighed and lamented, in this presidential primary season, the staging of yet another debate. But I can assure that in coming here tonight, you’ve chosen wisely, for not only have our three debaters agreed to keep the name calling and the personal attacks to a minimum, they also agreed to marshal well-sourced arguments in exploring some of the most vital questions facing our republic in the year 2012.

What is the place of money in our civic life? To what extent can we say that Americans are guided by a set of deep moral convictions? How do our national myths of equality and prosperity, as well as our self-understanding as the world’s savior, define our approach to 1

political and social problems?

Tonight these and other important questions will be explored and debated and, if we’re very lucky, maybe even put to rest.

Our esteemed moderator is a man known to all of you, E.J. Dionne. He is a columnist at The Washington Post and Commonweal, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, and a university professor at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute. He may be found, as you know, frequently commenting on radio and television. In addition, he’s the author of several books, including Why Americans Hate Politics and Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith in Politics after the Religious Right. Please welcome to our podium E.J. Dionne, who will introduce our speakers.

E.J. DIONNE: Thank you so much. I have been asked by the panelists to make clear that they made no such agreement as to name calling and personal invective. We’re going to have fun tonight —

ROBERT GEORGE: And I did once work for Newt Gingrich, E.J. You’re on notice.

E.J. DIONNE: I’m so happy to be here. I love coming to the Center, with the work that Jim McCartin does, the work that my very, very dear friends Peter and Peggy Steinfels do. I don’t think there has ever been a bad event here. So it’s good for your reputation to show up at the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture.

I know that in an election season people may have other candidates they want to vote for besides “Money, Morals, or Myth,” and so when you send up your cards, if somebody has another nominee as to what rules America, I don’t think we would object. And it doesn’t even have to begin with an “M,” although that would be helpful.

When I was in Peter and Peggy’s office, Bob Kuttner took me aside and, in order to prove his point about money ruling, offered me a bribe to be biased in his favor during the debate. But then Robert George took me aside and said, “Our country was founded on morals,” and so I thought about giving the money back. But then Susan Jacoby said, “No. That’s all a myth.” So I just pocketed the money, but I won’t deliver on the promise. I’ll be totally fair and balanced in this debate.

We have a wonderful group of people. We are going to go in the order of money, morals, and myth. Bob Kuttner is a writer, a journalist, and editor. He has spent his whole life trying to reform our country. He’s even had some successes in that effort. He is the author of many books — good books — including The Economic Illusion; Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets; The End of Laissez-Faire; The Life of the Party; The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity, and also Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency.

There’s a second book, which is not on here, which Bob might tell you about, and I am looking forward to the third volume in his Obama series.

This I didn’t know until tonight. Early in his career he worked at Pacifica Radio and served as general manager at WBAI here in New York. He was the Washington editor of The Village Voice, economics editor at The New Republic. He was a member of the national staff of The Washington Post. He was a columnist for Business Week, once upon a time the world’s only social democratic business magazine. He has been a columnist at 2

The Boston Globe. He has worked as an investigator for the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and executive director of President Carter’s National Commission on Neighborhoods. It is added in parentheses on this bio that he even wrote for Commonweal.

He is a cofounder and today coeditor of The American Prospect, which is one of my favorite magazines. There’s a supplement in the current issue that some of you may have seen. If you don’t subscribe to The American Prospect, I urge you all to do so. Bob will argue that wealth rules America.

Robert A. George — I emphasize that for reasons I will get to — is an editorial writer for the New York Post and a libertarian-oriented conservative blogger and pundit. He was born in Trinidad. He lived in the U.K., which is why he’ll speak better English than the rest of us — it was their language — before moving to the United States. He’s a graduate of St. John’s College in Annapolis. He worked for the Republican National Committee. Following the 1994 midterm elections, he was on the staff of House speaker Newt Gingrich, but he did not advise Gingrich in his planning for the Florida debates.

He has appeared on the CNN public affairs show Take 5 and other public affairs programs. He has written for National Review, Reason, The Huffington Post. He sponsors his own group blog, “Ragged Thots.” That’s T-h-o-t-s.

He’s occasionally a midnight standup comic, but he’ll be doing that today at an earlier hour. He shares the name of the well-known Princeton professor and philosopher. They often write for the same publications, and so it has become standard to refer to our George tonight as Robert A. George and the Princeton professor as Robert P. George. On the question of the power of money, we learned earlier that he has occasionally received honorarium checks for the other George, and he did not give us a definitive answer as to whether he sent them back.

Nonetheless, he will argue that America is ruled by its traditional moral commitments. It’s a great honor to have Robert George on our panel tonight.

Lastly, Susan Jacoby — I hope you Yankees fans will forgive this; that’s Jacoby as in Jacoby Ellsbury — is a writer and independent scholar. She began her career as a reporter for The Post. She has written on many topics, including law, religion, medicine, aging, women’s rights, political dissent in the Soviet Union, Russian literature. Her articles and essays have appeared just about everywhere — in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Book World, The LA Times, Newsday, Harper’s, The Nation, Vogue, The American Prospect again, Mother Jones, and AARP Magazine.

Her most recent book, just out in paperback, is Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age. It’s her tenth nonfiction book. Her other books include The Age of American Unreason, Alger Hiss and the Battle for History. Her 2004 book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism was named a notable nonfiction book of 2004 by both The Washington Post and The LA Times. Her other books include Moscow Conversations, based on her experiences in Moscow, Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge — we might see some of that tonight — and Half-Jew: A Daughter’s Search for Her Family’s Buried Past.

She has written a column called “The Spirited Atheist” for the On Faith website of The Washington Post. I warned her that I would introduce her as one of the most spiritually grounded atheists I have ever met. 3

Susan, not surprisingly, given that background, will argue that it’s the nation’s shared myths that rule us.

So to argue for — or perhaps against — money, I give you Robert Kuttner.

ROBERT KUTTNER: What a pleasure. Thank you, E.J. And thank you to Peter Steinfels and to E.J. for giving me this side of the debate, because I think it’s rather difficult to not believe that money very substantially rules America.

How does money rule America? Well, let’s count the ways. For starters, money, more than at any other time in our history, funds campaigns. With the ironically named Citizens United decision, unlimited amounts of money can rule politics. And money disproportionately comes from rich people. Your average citizen doesn’t give multimillion-dollar contributions to campaigns. That means that money speaks louder than ordinary citizens. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I recently wrote a piece in the Prospect — it’s in the reprint that you have — and the title was “Tocqueville for Toffs.” The point is that participatory inequality in politics is every bit as important as financial inequality, and participatory inequality correlates with financial inequality. De Tocqueville in 1840 identified famously the art of association with democracy. Political associations, to Tocqueville, were “great free schools” of democracy. They breathed civic life into formally democratic institutions. To engage in public issues, people did so more effectively in groups.

He wrote, “Americans of all ages, all stages of life are forever forming associations.”

Something dramatically has changed since 1840. If you walk around Washington, D.C., you will find a Tocquevillian world of civic engagement in the hotel rooms, the ballrooms, on K Street of a sort that Tocqueville could only dream of. The only problem is, it’s limited to the top half of 1 percent. Meanwhile, the capacity and ability of ordinary folks to participate in associations is declining by every indicator. So participatory inequality reinforces financial inequality. Voting percentage declines with income. Participation in associations of all kinds, political and social and civic, declines with income. As income becomes more unequal, so does political participation. And this is important because the only possible counterweight to great concentrated wealth in a democracy is civic involvement. So if civic involvement itself is a function of wealth, then you have a double reinforcement instead of a kind of countervailing power.

It was not ever thus. There was a time in this country — there were several times in this country, but most recently in the period beginning in the 1930s and extending into the 1960s and even the 1970s — when we had a much more egalitarian society, one where civic and public institutions coexisted alongside the natural power of great wealth. This operated in a number of ways. Thanks to the Great Depression and the fact that the financial elites had caused the Great Depression and we had Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal to get us out of the Great Depression, and thanks to the solidarity of World War II, government had more prestige, trade unions had more power, and ordinary people were more likely to participate both in associational life and in politics. Galbraith referred to this as the era of countervailing power. It was true.

So the natural influence of elites to have a disproportionate influence over political life was somewhat damped down.

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In addition, you had nonprofit institutions of all kinds — savings and loan associations, building and loan associations of the Jimmy Stewart variety — these were nonprofits. Nobody got rich off of them. Health insurance plans of that era tended to be nonprofits, tended to be co-ops. The trade union movement, of course, was much stronger. There was more of a sense of civic and social solidarity.

“Solidarity,” interestingly, was borrowed by the trade union movement from the Catholic Church via a nineteenth-century German Jesuit named Heinrich Pesch, who wrote of solidarism in the tradition of Aquinas. “Solidarism,” or “solidarity,” means that we’re all members of one community.

Now you have someone as conservative as Charles Murray, of all people, in his new book Coming Apart, lamenting what Bob Reich called “the segregation of the successful.” If the wealthiest people live in gated communities, go to private clubs, send their kids to private schools, then they don’t need public institutions, and society’s most influential people cease to be constituents for public institutions.

Why did all of this happen? We could spend a whole evening talking about this. But I think, on the one hand, faith in government receded because of events like the Vietnam War and Watergate. On the other hand, after being suppressed for thirty or forty years by indignation against the Great Depression and by regulation, the natural political power of financial elites came bounding back in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Business took off the gloves and weakened trade unions — privatization, deregulation, the hegemony of the market. And you see it cropping up in all kinds of ways. You see it ramifying — the commercialization of childhood, everything from Baby Einstein to toys that are really branded products, to even creatures that originated on Sesame Street, like Elmo, that give children a scripted sense of play rather than allowing children to bring their own imaginations to play, something that is developmentally very, very important, to colleges and universities gaming the ranking systems and behaving as if they were competing for market share like for-profit institutions.

It isn’t just money in politics. It isn’t just participatory inequality by social class, which would be bad enough. But it is creeping commercial values everywhere you look.

All of this feeds on itself. As financial elites become more powerful, they elect people to pass policies that make them even more powerful, and so things get more deregulated, more privatized.

I leave you with two questions. Does this shift — and this gets into Susan’s territory; it also gets into Robert’s territory — reflect a fundamental shift in values or preferences? Is it that Americans have decided that money really ought to rule, that we like this, this is a shift that we have voted for either as citizens or as consumers? Or is this a phenomenon of elite capture of institutions that we would rather not have been marketized?

Think about that question.

Secondly, even more importantly, is it reversible? Has the thing so fed on itself and have politics, as a natural expression of democracy, as the only main counterweight to wealth, become so tainted and so captured by wealth and so corrupted by wealth that the one most important counterweight to these trends has been ruined and will be very difficult to take back?

I leave you with one rather chilling statistic: A lot of us were very excited by Barack 5

Obama. When Barack Obama declared for president in 2007, he decided to make a big splash in the money primary. Of course, Hillary was the sure thing. She had it all sewn up. She did a tremendous amount of fundraising on Wall Street. When the totals were reported for the first quarter of 2007, Obama stunned everybody by out-fundraising Hillary Clinton on Wall Street. This does not bode well. Here Obama has pivoted into a more populist stance. He has appointed Eric Schneiderman, one of the most left-wing public officials in this country — who happens to be a prosecutor — to head up a new prosecutorial task force on the financial collapse. Yet the people who are the prime candidates to go to prison are Obama’s biggest donors.

It really is an example of how the influence of wealth corrupts even the impulses of our most promising and noble public figures. I am sad to say that I think there is little doubt that, at this stage of American history anyway, money rules. I wish it were otherwise. Thank you.

E.J. DIONNE: Robert will now defend morality’s role in defining us as a nation.

ROBERT GEORGE: Thank you.

I would say that Bob got the easy one. For one thing, I’m a Republican, so I’m not going to say that money doesn’t have a role in society. But, in fact, I would say that all three of the Ms play significant and overlapping roles in day-to-day politics. However, morality and myth are actually, I think, in certain ways, two sides of the same coin, if I can use that phrase.

When I think of morality, I think not just of the Judeo-Christian principles, which certainly have had and continue to have a major influence within our society. I think, though, of a specific overarching and more unique American morality. That is actually something that comes from the founding document. Obviously, the United States was founded partly by Pilgrims coming here for freedom from the Church of England. Within the founding of the United States, at least in terms of the people coming here, there is an element of religion, an element of morality, an element of people wishing to worship in their own way. It’s really in the context, though, of the Declaration, where you make the break from England and you make a determination that man is — we come from a perspective that man is — excuse me. The Declaration obviously tells us that we have a — it’s a unique vision that is — that we are unique and self-evident, that all men, of course, are created equal, endowed by a Creator, that our sense of equality comes from divinity, is divinely inspired, and we have unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I would say to you that those very founding principles — that is the overarching morality that informs the United States and continues to inform it today.

I would also say that the major controversies, the major conflicts that have developed in the United States inevitably come about because of a conflict and an inability for the United States to live up to that founding creed, that founding moral statement. That, of course, is true in the context of the Civil War, where the country, which was founded on this idea of equality, of all men being created equal — it was inevitably in conflict with the fact that a significant percentage of it still remained in bondage. While Bob and others would obviously point out that money was also one of the major reasons for the Civil War, and other myths, such as white racial superiority, were also significant factors, that tension, that basic tension, that the conflict that was within the founding document and the reality in which America was existing — it could not be resolved and, of course, you 6

had a civil war.

Eighty years later, the civil rights movement, which came about from the left side of politics, coming out of the black church, once again demanding that the United States live up to its functioning moral principle — it allowed a black preacher to stand in front of the Lincoln monument and demand that the United States live up to it. This is important here because these churches were not wealthy. These churches were poor. The movement itself, while it had some wealthy white liberals helping it here and there, was still ultimately poor. But its moral authority forced America to say, “This is not who we have said we are supposed to be,” and it forced change.

I would then say to you that that very example influenced subsequent social movements, including the women’s movement, including the gay rights movement. In fact, it also ripples onto the right as well. In fact, in the same way that African Americans coming out of the civil rights movement ended up taking over the Democratic Party, which ironically had previously been oppressing it, and becoming a significant voting bloc there — the flip side of that is that on the conservative side, the right-to-life movement has become the building block, the major, major force, amongst the Republican Party.

The Republican Party that exists today is different from what it was twenty, thirty years ago. It’s different because it was the social conservatives, in certain ways, taking the very model of King and the social liberal movements of the 1960s and once again going to the mall and saying, “If we believe in these ideas of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, even the smallest, the youngest version of life has to be respected.”

I would say that that principle is still ultimately governing America. Even the wealthiest of individuals will not be able to buy an office if he or she doesn’t at least pay homage to these ideas of equality, these ideas of divinely inspired equality and respect to the unalienable rights which are in the Constitution.

E.J. DIONNE: Thank you. Now Susan will argue that we’re all talking mythology here.

SUSAN JACOBY: Thank you, E.J.

First, I want to make it clear that when I talk about the essential myths that shape our politics, I’m not talking about myth as either truth or falsehood, but as an emotional framework that defines the terms of our discussions, whether we like it or not.

The crucial importance of our national mythology is that it can be expanded to encompass everything, from the now-unlimited use of corporate money in campaigns to a candidate’s views on gay marriage or teachers unions as a threat to the American way of life. You might say — I do say — that the myth of America as a pure meritocracy is to our politics as the myth of lifelong monogamous love is to marriage.

While we’re all aware, in various degrees, depending on our circumstances, that these myths are not precise descriptions of reality, we all, again in varying degrees, believe that there is some essential relationship between the myths and the success of what we’re trying to do. That’s true whether our enterprise involves the nation or personal lives. If Newt Gingrich really was dim enough to suggest “open marriage” to his second wife, you can bet he didn’t formulate that thought, even to himself, in the first week of their marriage. Hardly anyone would marry at all without some belief in the attainability of the myth of eternal passionate love, even the serial groom whose mantra is, “This time I’ve finally picked the right one.” 7

In similar fashion, Mitt Romney, in presenting himself as a meritocratic example of what all Americans can supposedly achieve if they’re freed from the bonds of an interfering, greedy nanny state, probably does believe on some level that the social capital he inherited from a father who was both the president of an automobile company and governor of Michigan has nothing — perish the thought — to do with the success he has achieved thus far in life. But it ain’t necessarily so, to borrow from an American composer who was pretty tuned into American myth himself.

The assertion that America is a meritocracy in which anyone who works hard enough can achieve success is really only the most important sub-myth of the overarching myth of American exceptionalism. In a recently published book on the racial politics of the Obama presidency, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy describes exceptionalism as “a community of perceptions, ideas, intuitions, and ambitions which posits, among other things, that the United States is uniquely virtuous, uniquely powerful, uniquely destined to accomplish great things, and thus uniquely authorized to act in ways which Americans would object to if done by other nations.”

The only element Kennedy leaves out is the idea that America is singularly blessed by God. Many of the most important founders were deists, and they preferred the more vague “Providence” to the naming of a traditional deity. But the meaning is the same: Somebody or something out there likes us — not only us, but likes us best.

Now, we hear the phrase “American exceptionalism” bandied about so much these days that it’s hard to remember that this was once used almost entirely by historians. When I was growing up in the 1950s, accusing a candidate of not believing in American exceptionalism wouldn’t have had much meaning because the electorate wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what the accusation meant. But, of course, a myth is even more powerful when it’s so much taken for granted that you don’t even have to use language to describe it. I think all of the explicit talk about American exceptionalism we’re hearing now is a testament to the deep anxiety of Americans that we have lost a lot of what we have always considered our specialness. When you really believe you’re the best, you’re not obliged to go around puffing out your chest and shouting, “I’m number one!”

Many of you have no doubt seen the quote from Obama’s April 2009 press conference in Strasbourg, France, when he responded to a reporter’s question about American exceptionalism in a way that the political right does not find satisfactory. His opening sentence was, “I believe in an American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Now, that’s the single sentence used in attack ads. However, the president followed up his opening line by saying, in part, “I’m enormously proud of my country and its role in history in the world. If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don’t think Americans should be embarrassed to see the evidence of the sacrifices of our troops. We have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution and our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality that, though imperfect, are exceptional, and I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that leadership depends on our ability to create partnerships.”

In this full passage, as opposed to the attack sound bite, Obama isn’t denying American exceptionalism, but he is modifying it to say that our special leadership also depends on our connectedness to others. Of course, everyone knows that we are no longer prepared to pay any price and bear any burden to maintain our role in the world. But saying this 8

violates the most vainglorious description of exceptionalism.

However, I think it’s in the realm of domestic issues where a bloated and bloviated definition of exceptionalism really creates public danger. The most important myth tied to exceptionalism is, as I have already mentioned, the conviction that here, in contrast to those old class-bound European societies, anybody can become what he or she wants. It doesn’t matter who your parents were or what advantages they were able to provide you in America; in America — I should say, only in America — it’s not where you start, but where you finish, and where you finish is something you can control.

There’s no doubt that Barack Obama believes in the myth of mobility as much as, arguably more than, anyone else who has ever occupied the White House. How often has he said that his story is possible only in America? And he isn’t wrong. There is at this time no other country in the developed world in which someone whose skin color marks him as a member of society’s most historically despised minority could have been elected to the nation’s highest leadership position. But are we entitled to pat ourselves on the back for this? Does the existence of a President Obama mean that we can all make it on our own or is it the exception that proves the rule? It’s a lot tougher to make it if you’re born into the wrong race or, especially, social classes.

In recent months, there has been a powerful challenge to the idea that we’re a meritocracy from well-done studies showing that it is now much harder for Americans to rise from one economic class to another than it is in the rest of the developed world. To me, one of the most disturbing aspects of these findings is that they apply to people attempting to move upward on rungs within the middle class, as well as those trying to move from the lowest class to a higher one. According to research for the Pew Charitable Trusts, more than 40 percent of Americans in the middle fifth of income earners in the last two generations have gone down. That’s got to be scary.

Now, you can use the split between the myth of meritocracy and the real current state of American life in two political ways. You can say that if America is no longer as meritocratic as it once was, the real villain is government. You can label any mention of class as class warfare. Or you can say, yes, social mobility has always been one of the great things about America, but it isn’t just because we have always been a nation of rugged individualists, but because the government has, in fact, at crucial points done a lot to further more ability. You can point out, for instance, that one of the major periods of upward mobility in America occurred after the Second World War, when the GI Bill quintupled the percentage of Americans who were able to go to college, thus facilitating a mass movement of people from the working poor into the college-educated, white-collar middle class.

So you can use the larger myth of American exceptionalism to push any policy you want. But you can’t ignore the myths. That’s even more true of one more component of the exceptionalism myth, the notion of Americans as a uniquely virtuous people. As someone whose subject as a writer is the secular side of American history, I don’t want to suggest that the myth of American virtue is an exclusively religious idea. This has always been a secular claim, too, going back to Jefferson and Madison. But the Enlightenment deist concept of virtue had more to do with the opportunity, in Thomas Paine’s famous phrase, to make the world over again, without the oppression of state religion or God-sanctioned aristocracy, than it did with any idea of divine blessedness. The old idea of American virtue certainly had nothing to do with the conservative political claim today that we are a Christian nation. They can say Judeo-Christian all they want when there are rabbis in the audience, but what they really mean is a Christian government. When we talk about so-called values issues, which could just as easily be called virtue 9

issues, we’re really running up against competing definitions of virtue. I don’t think anything illustrates this more clearly, in closing, than the battle over whether America’s motto is or ought to be “In God We Trust” or “E Pluribus, Unum.” The motto “Out of Many, One” is rooted deep in the heart of American exceptionalism. It dates back to 1782, when it was adopted for the Great Seal of the United States. “In God We Trust” doesn’t occur at all in revolutionary iconography, for the very good reason that it could just as easily have been the motto of any theocratic monarchy in Europe at the time.

Incidentally, neither “E Pluribus Unum” nor “In God We Trust” was ever the legal motto of the United States, which got along very well without a motto until 1956, when Congress, at the height of the Cold War, made that godly phrase our first mandatory national slogan.

So what can we possibly be talking about, other than a battle over myth, when we see Congress moronically taking time out in November from pressing real-world issues like the extension of unemployment benefits to reaffirm “In God We Trust” as the national motto by a vote of 369 to 9? One thing we’re certainly talking about is the fact that 369 members of Congress won’t have to worry about ads next fall saying, “Infidel congressman doesn’t trust God.”

I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen, that we’re publicly reaffirming our trust in God at this moment for the same reason that we’re hearing so much about American exceptionalism, the reason being that deep down we are no more sure about our national virtue and trust in God than we are about just how exceptional America is.

So what happens to our politics when too great a distance opens between our most cherished myths and the reality around us? Do we content ourselves with singing “America the Beautiful” at the end of campaign rallies? Actually, what was most striking to me about those scenes at the end of Romney’s rallies was the fact that most of the patriotic American exceptionalists in the audience didn’t know the words to that great song. If you can only hum a few bars of a myth, does it count? Stay tuned.

E.J. DIONNE: Susan’s wonderful talk reminded me of Yogi Berra’s great line upon learning that the lord mayor of Dublin was Jewish. Many of you know what he said. He exclaimed, “Only in America.”

The way we have set this up is that this uniquely exceptional, virtuous, and upwardly mobile panel would have five minutes each to reply to each other. We’re just going to do it — it’s not really fair. We should have done this by lot, but we didn’t. It’s actually Kuttner’s bribe. Kuttner goes first again.

ROBERT KUTTNER: Money talks, baby.

Well, this is getting very interesting. For a moment, I thought Susan was sort of creeping over into the money camp when she was talking about upward mobility.

Sure, myth — not in the sense of falsehood, but myth in the sociological or anthropological sense of a foundational set of beliefs — matters. Morality matters. One of the great things about America is that our foundational myths have indeed been capacious enough to accommodate the expansion of democracy. They have been adaptable enough to adapt themselves to new challenges. Obviously, morality matters, too.

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Yet I would argue that all of these are under assault as they never quite have been in the past by the overweening dominance of commerce, of commercial values, of money. So you have the myth of meritocracy, the myth of equal justice under law, the myth of social mobility, of equal participation, of community. These are not only cherished myths, but they are cherished realities. They’re what make a society a place where one would want to live and raise one’s children. All of these realities or myths are being undermined by the market.

It’s interesting. I was thinking as I was listening to my two co-panelists that you can do this according to Marx: “All that is solid melts into air.” You can do it according to conservatives, like Edmund Burke. You can do it according to the Church, which was the first great counterweight to the power of money. You can do it as a social democrat á la Karl Polanyi, who I think is more persuasive than either Marx or Burke in talking about the dangers of the market and market values overwhelming other values.

Even American exceptionalism or Greek exceptionalism or French exceptionalism, the idea that there are differences, that there are cherished differences, among nations, among societies, that reflect unique histories — a very Burkean, conservative kind of notion. Against that are posited the universalistic myths of the market. As Maggie Thatcher said, there is no alternative; there is one clear, most efficient, best way, only way of doing things. It becomes very dogmatic. So you have the dogmatism of free-market economics in a kind of hideous marriage with the political power of wealth. There becomes only one possible way of doing things, and it drives out and crowds out cherished myths, cherished unique national experiences, other moral claims.

There’s a doctrine in the law much prized by conservative law and economics scholars called “efficient breach.” Sometimes it’s economically efficient to walk away from a contract, so the heck with the contract. You have Goldman Sachs that allegedly is representing the best interests of the investors that it serves creating securities for the sole purpose to bet against them. So the sucker who thought that Goldman Sachs could be trusted to sell him or her securities is actually being played for a sucker.

When I was writing about the meltdown, I learned a charming phrase that apparently is very conventional in certain circles on Wall Street: IBGYBG. Has anybody heard that one? It stands for “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.” Stick lucky Pierre with securities that are going to go south, but we’ll make our bundle and we’ll be out of here.

So morality, myth — they are all at risk of being submerged by the third M, not so much money, but market, claiming a universal imperative set of values that makes religious dogma seem positively liberal by comparison. So I submit that it is money and market that we have to watch out for, if we are going to retain what is valuable in morality and myth. Thank you.

E.J. DIONNE: You know, Spiro Agnew contributed to the language the phrase “the nattering nabobs of negativism.” Robert, I want you to persuade us that we’re a moral people and that this is all negativism.

ROBERT GEORGE: That can be a tough job, I’ll admit that. I will point out that Bob in his opening remarks mentioned the Citizens United case, which has helped open up the doors to unlimited contributions in the political process. It should be noted that when the Supreme Court came down with that decision in 2010, it wasn’t just the idea that corporations can contribute — it wasn’t just the case that corporations can give as much as they want. So, too, can labor unions. That’s an important proviso, just to show that 11

while the overall question that Bob is pointing to of money controlling everything — it’s not just on one side in terms of who is able to participate in a given debate.

In the United States, it is interesting that we are at a point now where a black man is president of the United States, but it will be many, many years, if ever, that you’ll see an atheist in the White House. I think that sort of speaks to that overarching moral principle I was speaking about before. While we talk about the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it’s the idea, going back to the founding, that this comes from a Creator, that it is divinely inspired.

I’m not sure if Susan considers that one of our common myths or we’re just kind of talking to ourselves. But it’s something that is so woven into the society that, again, if you want to be president, you have to show some kind of belief.

I would also point out, too, just speaking — Susan brought up the exceptionalism point — while Barack Obama is a great example of the exceptionalism that the United States prides itself on, so too is — in certain ways, even more so — Bill Clinton or even my former boss, Newt Gingrich, both of whom came from broken homes and still managed, one to become president of the United States and the other to become speaker of the House. This doesn’t always happen by accident. I think that it’s not something that happens automatically in other nations.

So I personally do believe in the exceptionalism, the unique character of the United States. I will also admit that I’m an immigrant myself. I’m not running for president or anything.

But ultimately speaking, the moral component is there. It’s also the case in contemporary times that, as much as we see more and more garbage on television, the viewers for these shows — if you compare them to what the viewership was ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, it’s just a fraction. We have, in a sense, moved away from a sort of common consensus market. It’s not necessarily the market that is controlling everything. I would say it is the markets that are starting to control things. We are moving more into niche neighborhoods, niche communities, where we are able to inculcate our own values, our own moral beliefs. That, I think, ultimately may arguably be a good thing.

SUSAN JACOBY: Oh, dear, I wasn’t going to debate with anyone, because I agree with almost everything Robert Kuttner said and a lot more of what Robert George said than I expected to. But he had to bring up that thing about “it’s going to be a lot longer before an atheist is president than it has been for a black man to be president.”

I wanted to stay away from this so much, but I can’t help it. When I wrote Freethinkers in 2004, my first interview — I wasn’t aware that anybody actually thought that you couldn’t have any morality if you were an atheist, until I was on a talk show with a conservative host. It was my very first interview. He asked me, “If you don’t believe in God, what’s to stop you from murdering someone?”

I really didn’t have any idea of how to answer it because, honestly — I told him, “Murdering someone never occurred to me” —

ROBERT GEORGE: Until that moment.

SUSAN JACOBY: No, not until that moment, because one pities ignorance rather than wants to murder because of it. 12

I would say it is not any example of morality or any language of natural rights endowed by the Creator that is the reason why it’s going to be a long time before an atheist is going to be president. It is because there is a general stupidity in this country, which doesn’t exist in the rest of Western Europe, which actually thinks that anyone who doesn’t believe in God is really on the qui vive to go out and kill and rape and murder.

However, in thinking about both the market and morality, I don’t want to shift the terms of the debate, but there is something that we all left out. I think to think about the market or the markets, whichever you’re talking about — this is the way in which both the left and the right will talk about the market — as either a god or a demon sometimes is the same thing as thinking about that “demon seed” Washington as the root of all of our problems, which Newt Gingrich, hilariously, and Romney are both trying to pretend that they have nothing to do with.

I was very impressed by what Bob Kuttner said about the decline of voluntary civic associations. There’s something he didn’t mention, which I have to think is something that does very much have to do with the market. In the 1930s, in the 1940s, there was no Internet. There were no video games. There was radio, but it was something that people did for maybe an hour a night to listen to their favorite programs. There wasn’t television at all. In addition to what money is doing, we have a culture in which people are too lazy to do these other things, not because the demon market and the demon Washington are having anything to do with it, but because what they want to do is look at their screens for as much of the day as they can. This doesn’t go very well with participatory democracy either. I think this passivity is not caused only by the market and by the feeling that there are so many forces beyond our control, but because we have become a pretty lazy lot of people.

That is something that really has to be taken into account. It hasn’t existed to the degree it exists now at any period of our history. The ignorance quotient is very, very important, and I think it lends a lot of impetus to all the worst impulses in our political culture, whether they involve mistaken ideas about atheists or the idea that there is absolutely nothing that can be done about the forces of money.

I’ll close that with a very good example. All the talking heads have been talking for the last week about how Romney won in Florida because he had this immense amount of money to spend on attack ads against Newt Gingrich. Well, who is responsible for the results of elections if people allow their views on a candidate to be determined by a plethora attack ads? Let’s look in the mirror.

E.J. DIONNE: I knew the Holy Spirit would inspire Susan to give a great response to that atheist president observation.

ROBERT GEORGE: I do want to make a point. I did not want to imply that an atheist is amoral or immoral, but I just did say it as a reflection of the society and its determinations of the roles of morality, spirituality, and so forth in the context of the public sphere. That’s why it would be difficult for an atheist to become president. I wasn’t trying to insult any atheists. E.J. DIONNE: I have been involved in a number of these discussions, and I had the mischievous thought that we may have already had an atheist president, but we will never know.

ROBERT GEORGE: He wouldn’t stand up for his non-beliefs. 13

E.J. DIONNE: Right, exactly.

The great thing about being a moderator is that you can be a wrecker. You don’t have to make a constructive case for anything if you so choose. So I’m going to be inspired by Susan’s intellectual defenses of skepticism over the years by asking a skeptical question of each of our panelists. Then I’ll get some of the questions from the audience.

Let me start with you, Bob. If money rules, how did we get Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Wagner Act, the prescription drug benefit, the earned income tax credit, the Affordable Care Act, McCain-Feingold before the Supreme Court ruined it with Citizens United, Dodd-Frank, and Sarbanes-Oxley?

ROBERT KUTTNER: Let’s take each of those in turn. The point I’m making is not that money rules all the time, but that it rules a lot more than it did at earlier periods of our history. If free public education were before Congress today, it would be voted down. If Social Security were before Congress today, it would be voted down —

E.J. DIONNE: No. It would be filibustered in the Senate.

ROBERT KUTTNER: That, too.

Dodd-Frank, tragically, is more loophole than law. We are finding that out as they try to come up with regulations to implement it. The reason is that Wall Street can field so many lawyers to dominate the rulemaking procedures that the thing is just full of holes.

Yes, there was a time in our history — and I don’t want to fall victim to “good old daysism” — the Wagner Act and Social Security were possible because the last great crisis gave rise to a courageous, progressive president and he had a social movement helping him out. The reason that the Affordable Care Act is also very inefficient is that accommodations had to be made to the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry to get the thing passed at all. It is not the progressive breakthrough that it might have been.

So I think if you compare recent social legislation with earlier social legislation, it only proves the case.

ROBERT GEORGE: I don’t know if that necessarily proves the case that opposition to those is solely because of money. I think it’s also the case that as the country has grown and the country has grown older and has become more either temperamentally or politically conservative, there is not the constituency that there once was for Social Security. I can’t point — excuse me, there’s not the constituency to pass something the way Social Security was passed — health-care reform as a fully progressive or a fully left- wing version of that. So you ended up having to get the kind of compromise — again, I’m not sure if that’s a reflection of money or just a reflection of how the country’s ideology has changed, the country’s moral outlook on how involved government should be in social policies has changed. ROBERT KUTTNER: E.J., may I have a few minutes to rebut?

SUSAN JACOBY: Could I say something about that?

ROBERT KUTTNER: Go ahead. 14

SUSAN JACOBY: Again, there is also the element of ignorance. All of the debates we’re not having yet on Social Security and we’re not going to have during the election, because everybody is going to stand up, as Romney did in Florida, and say, “Oh, I’m not going to touch your Social Security.” But all of the debates — and I’m not saying, by the way, that there don’t have to be changes in Social Security.

Notice I’m not using the words “entitlement programs.” It’s really a nice language rule. It’s just the way the word “liberalism” has been demonized over the years. “Entitlement” as used by the right really means “disentitlement” now. It means something to which you really are not entitled.

But ignorance plays a great role in all of this, as well as the fact that the center has moved rightward, which I think it has in American politics in the last twenty years, because all of the talk now about raising the retirement age — I’m no fan of retirement — is based on the idea that we’re living longer and we’re healthier. All very well, but the fact is that unemployment is at its highest rate ever now for people in their 50s and 60s who are looking for work. So to talk about how we can eliminate Social Security because people can work longer without talking about the fact that there aren’t any jobs for people in this age group is just being blind to reality.

E.J. DIONNE: By the way, have you noticed that Susan is slowing shifting positions? She’s saying that ignorance rules America.

ROBERT GEORGE: You were looking for something that didn’t begin with an M. There you go.

ROBERT KUTTNER: This question of whether Americans are getting older and getting less inclined to support social programs — you look at public opinion data; national health insurance, single-payer, Medicare for all, wins about three to one, four to one. It just doesn’t get onto the menu because the menu is dominated by very powerful, elite industries. You look at whether people want Social Security privatized. They don’t. But privatization would make Wall Street just a ton of money on fees. It would be very convenient for pumping up the stock market. So privatization has a big head of steam.

I don’t think the average voter is less inclined to support these programs than he or she ever was. But I think the political center of gravity in terms of what politicians are willing to put forward and the power of elites to influence the menu is what has changed.

E.J. DIONNE: I was going to ask Robert a question that I decided was maybe too political. I was going to ask, how is it that the personal behavior of Democratic politicians seems to matter more to religious conservatives than the personal behavior of Republican politicians? Although you can answer that if you want, I thought then that maybe the personal wealth of Republican politicians matters more to liberals than the personal wealth of Democratic politicians, except to Bob Kuttner, who really can’t stand the way rich Democrats behave. But that’s another —

ROBERT KUTTNER: Except Roosevelt.

E.J. DIONNE: If you want to take that on — but I would like to ask a different question, which does tilt a little bit toward Bob’s side. A lot of people who say that values are so important in our country almost never ever want to talk about what the moral limits on markets are, and even on the most basic things — markets that use sexuality in 15

advertising shamelessly to sell anything or constant advertising that promotes a kind of materialism that I think a lot of conservatives and liberals, in their hearts, are against. Yet we do this. It’s as if the counterculture has become the over-the-counterculture. It strikes me that people who make the moral arguments only rarely throw out that challenge to the marketplace.

Maybe you are an exception, but I would like to ask you how you deal with that conundrum.

ROBERT GEORGE: I work for the New York Post, so I shouldn’t really say anything bad about Fox Broadcasting, right?

E.J. DIONNE: You can test their commitment to free speech.

ROBERT GEORGE: Exactly. Free speech is one thing. Free unemployment is something different.

I would say that there are actually a number of conservative groups out there who do critique the garbage that ends up on television. I think it’s the Parents Television Association that regularly condemns various language or storylines and so forth. I think that is out there.

Again, it is interesting that — I don’t think it’s necessarily the context of money, but you have organizations, corporations, individuals, and so forth that will point to the Bill of Rights, the idea of freedom of speech. Any group that looks like it’s trying to censor speech, expression, what have you, ends up looking like the people wanting to burn the witches in the 1600s. What ended up happening there is, I think the instinctive live-and- let-live element within the American culture ends up ultimately siding with the marketplace right there.

While the religious or spiritually based morality ends up being on one side, the more libertarian or, if you will, First Amendment fundamentalist aspect, which is very significant, ends up pushing back against the traditional or religious morality.

SUSAN JACOBY: Whenever you ask a question like that that uses this word “morals” and “morality” — there’s a line in Alice in Wonderland when Alice is asking about some moral. The duchess says, “Tut-tut, child, everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.” It’s a great line.

Religiously based morality versus First Amendment morality or versus market morality — I don’t think that’s a correct way of putting the problem. The fact is, we have many religiously based moralities. What Catholics for Free Choice thinks about advertising for contraceptives and what the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops thinks about it are two very different things. This is true across the religious spectrum. It’s also true across the secular spectrum.

So I don’t think that any of these moral questions about the market and the way it frames us really have anything to do with one monolithic, old-time-religion morality, on the other hand, and a secular or a free-market morality.

E.J. DIONNE: In fact, when it comes to materialism, you have people who are quite secular and people who are quite religious, both of whom are critical of materialism. 16

SUSAN JACOBY: And many in both groups who think it’s just great.

E.J. DIONNE: I want to ask you the following question. If myth rules America, why are we so skeptical about absolutely everything? As my evidence, I would say the response to your talk in this audience. Why is unmasking pretense such an American habit? Why is revisionism and counter-revisionism so popular, and not just in the academy? I think I could, if I had the time — but I wouldn’t want to waste our time — as my evidence for these propositions, I will just point to most everything on television, most everything on the radio, and most everything coming out of universities. Aren’t we a bunch of skeptics, and not myth believers, as a nation?

SUSAN JACOBY: I think that this kind of skepticism is greatly overrated. I think there are a lot of things that people aren’t skeptical about at all. One of the reasons that I don’t present myth as something that is bad or useless, although it’s certainly something that should be questioned — and I think that, in fact, does go back right to the founding of our country and precedes the Declaration of Independence. Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson ran off from that nice theocracy because there were different kinds of people here right from the start.

I hate to keep sounding like a Julie One-Note, but I think that the skepticism about everything has grown much less as people — I can’t tell you, when I was writing “The Spirited Atheist,” how many emails I would get on my author Website from people saying, “Such-and-such is true because it was on the Internet.” I think that the idea that because something is on television or in some sort of recognizable medium, whatever kind of medium, that it must be true, that it gives it validation, whether it’s on Fox News or MSNBC — I don’t think that we are such a skeptical country. I think critical thinking is one of our really great deficits in this country.

ROBERT GEORGE: At the same time, I would also say, though, that I think that the fact that the average person thinks that most politicians lie, that it’s very clear that a lot of institutions — sadly, some even religious institutions — have failed to live up to their own stated moral precepts definitely causes skepticism. In certainly cases, unfortunately, it can be a skepticism that can lead to deadly results. For example, you have the growing movement against child vaccination. That’s the kind of skepticism that, again, is deadly. I think it is a growing skepticism.

Obviously, there is a healthy skepticism, because you should always double-check — whether the politician is a Democrat, Republican, Independent, or whatever, you should definitely double-check and do your homework even if he says the sky is blue. You should just check on that.

But because the broader center is not holding as much as it once did, you have the downside of skepticism as well.

ROBERT KUTTNER: I just want to underscore some of this. We’re really not fighting about the New Deal. We’re fighting about the Enlightenment. There is descent into tribalism. There is descent into a dogma that doesn’t require recourse to evidence and a kind of anti-science sensibility. Ben Barber summed it up in a two-and-a-half-word title, “Jihad vs. McWorld.” The reaction to too much market is a kind of primitivism, because it’s so threatening that when it takes over everything, you revert to tribalism, and tribalism is very inconsistent with liberal democracy, in which common humanity and common citizenship are taken for granted. 17

E.J. DIONNE: First of all, I want to report that we have some votes for other Ms here. It’s very impressive. It’s like naming a Sue Grafton novel, for those of you who know her work.

We have one vote for “metaphor,” which I really like. Someone from the English Department is here, or maybe cultural studies: What do you think of the role that language plays in the way Americans think of the way leaders express their ideas and programs?

Then we have two votes for “mendacity”: Dishonesty plays a key role in money and myth. What about morals?

Then the other vote about mendacity: Americans have a great tradition of seeming to be more than they are, of salesmanship, of bunkum, and baloney in politics.

In fact, I do think Newt Gingrich’s great contribution to the language this year is his reference to “pious baloney,” which I am going to use now for a long time.

Does anybody want to comment on either mendacity or metaphor?

SUSAN JACOBY: I was just whispering to him that metaphor and myth seem to me to be almost the same thing.

But language — it’s no use ranting on about the deterioration of language. I tried in my last book. I made a stupid, futile stand against the use of the word “folks,” pointing out that “folks,” while it’s a perfectly good word for the barroom or the playground, was never used in presidential addresses before 1980. Just think about it: “We here highly resolve that these folks shall not have died in vain, that this government of the folks, by the folks, and for the folks shall not perish from the earth.”

But I think the deterioration of language is inseparable from everything else. It’s a subgroup of our dependence on an increasingly debased mass media.

ROBERT GEORGE: It sounds like you want to pass a folk law.

ROBERT KUTTNER: I do think bunkum and mendacity in politics are a great American tradition. There are exceptional periods. I would like to think that politics was somewhat better in the 1930s and 1940s. But go back to the nineteenth century. You had long periods of just utter mediocrity.

Barney Frank got a great line off the other night. I had the misfortune to be on a panel where I had to follow Barney. He said, “If you think politicians are terrible, who elected these people? The voters are nothing to write home about either.”

E.J. DIONNE: Here is the briefest question, and it’s kind of fun. Occupy Wall Street: Money, morals, or myth? Does anybody want to take that on?

ROBERT KUTTNER: I will. I have had a lot of arguments and conversations about Occupy Wall Street. It’s not a politics. It’s a cri de coeur. Other folks have to turn it into a politics. It’s not going to morph into, I don’t think, a mass movement that is capable of changing America. On the other hand, it has already made an enormous contribution. It 18

has given us language, metaphor, that really describes what ought to be the political essence of our era, the 99 versus the 1. If it had only done that, Dayenu — it would have been a great contribution.

But I think the people who are trying to capture it and turn it to their own purposes — you can’t do that with anarchists — they misunderstand its essence. On the one hand, it’s a very good thing that it’s there, but the task of creating a political movement is going to have to proceed elsewhere.

ROBERT GEORGE: I just would say this. Obviously I disagree a little bit here with Bob. I think it’s more myth than anything else. It seems, just from my perspective of trying to compare it with the movements of the 1960s, that the idea of occupying a geography, even if it’s for the furtherance of an anarchist ideal — it seems to me illogical.

I will say, politically speaking, it came along at a convenient time for President Obama and some Democrats, in the context of the amount of pressure that the Tea Party was putting on Republicans. Suddenly there seemed to be, at least initially, a mass movement that seemed to be pushing back. But the Tea Party individuals, think of them what you will, at least seem to have one or two specific ideas that they wanted the members that they sent to Washington to vote on or vote against. There was a stronger connection between the movement and the politics and the politicians.

Right now, though, the Occupiers — you seem to get more of a falling-out now between those who are occupying and even some of the liberal Democratic mayors of the cities. They had to make their own determination saying that they can’t completely take over public space.

So I think it seems at this point more myth than movement.

E.J. DIONNE: Here’s a really interesting question. Is it possible that our laziness is related to our common commitment to acquisitiveness, which serves as a social glue in the absence of shared assumptions about matters of greater moment?

That’s a great question, whoever sent that up.

SUSAN JACOBY: That is a great question. I think the answer is yes. But when it has to be so, when you look at things like people lining up to buy the newest version of the iPhone and they’re selling out, it’s great for Apple’s stock, but it makes no sense for any reason, because the previous version of the iPhone — I understand there are a few bells and whistles that are different in every version, but you can get along just as nicely with six months ago’s iPhone as you can with a new one.

So there’s something about possession itself involved particularly in the success of this particular company, which to me epitomizes that. But it’s also a commitment, I think, not just to acquisitiveness, but to the easiest forms of entertainment available. I think that’s where the laziness and the acquisitiveness kind of come together, because the more of the stuff we have, the less we have to do to go out and entertain ourselves. There has never been an era in which you had to do less.

If I might add something else, thinking again of the very excellent things Bob Kuttner said about the decline of civic associations and the idea of bowling alone, one of the things that I notice all of the time is — when I first came to New York, when there were bars that you could sit and have a drink in, in Grand Central Station, I used to sit and look and just 19

wonder at how all of these people avoided running into each other. It was a beautiful dance to watch, really. Now I spend half my time when I’m walking through Grand Central looking out for guys who weigh more than 200 pounds who have their heads buried in the iPhone, because they can do damage to me if they walk into me.

It seems to me that this has something to do, not only with acquisitiveness and laziness, but is a real breach in the kind of automatic awareness of others which is such a beautiful and human thing to see.

E.J. DIONNE: Any other thoughts on acquisitiveness as our social glue?

ROBERT KUTTNER: I think the marriage of commercialism and entertainment is just fatal to civil society — shopping itself as entertainment. Maybe this is something that liberals and conservatives can actually agree on. Any activity that takes effort — learning to play a musical instrument or learning to write something or learning to do a sport as opposed to watching one on television — makes you a more developed human being. It has reached a point where politics and civic engagement is just one more form of entertainment rather than something that exists in a totally different realm. I think it’s yet another way in which commerce is corrosive.

Now, we all love commerce, right? Up to a point. It’s a matter of balance. It’s a matter of equilibrium. Going shopping is great fun. Using an iPhone is great fun. All the proliferation of foods is great fun. But there needs to be a balance. When one form of entertainment, driven by commerce, crowds out everything else, you not only lose your civic society, but you lose individual pursuits that make you a more evolved person who is more engaged with your capacities and able to develop them. I think the irony of all the apps, all the things you can do on the Internet, is that it promises — and occasionally delivers — all kinds of conveniences and new ways of engaging with the culture, and I think it often — not always, but often — falls way short. It’s, the medium is the message. The thing itself becomes a kind of all-consuming downdraft.

ROBERT GEORGE: As we learned a few years ago, the possibility of literally amusing ourselves to death — I guess what we have actually found out, though, is that the Bible was right all along, that Apple was responsible for the fall of man.

But I will say this, though. The leaps in technology that have occurred over the last ten to twenty years have also led to the creation of virtual communities. You may be somebody in Idaho and you are able to talk and chat in real time with somebody in St. Petersburg, Russia, or New York City. While it’s true, because we live in New York and we are sick and tired of running into somebody who is not paying attention, and we hate the fact that ten or fifteen years ago, if somebody was walking around talking to the ether, you knew they were crazy — now they’re just talking — I still think, though, that some of the technological advances, while we’re still sort of trying to sift them out and we’re going through this kind of change — there are a lot of positives there. I was talking to a friend of mine a few months ago. Both of her parents are deaf. She hears. She talks about how the Internet and Internet-capable television have created these amazing advances for the deaf, allowing them to communicate within their own communities at far, far distance.

So I will agree that there is a downside, and we can see society kind of fraying because people are becoming too much pod people. I think, though, that the balance that we’re talking about — there are many, many positive aspects to it that we shouldn’t be afraid of.

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E.J. DIONNE: Partly in response to the discussion, I kind of want to make a case for morality myself, just to join Robert, and suggest the following. When you look at the origins of our republic, there is a set of principles that, even if they are put into a category of founding myths, nonetheless drive a lot of behavior, or at least people have to justify their behavior in terms of them. “All men are created equal” is one of the great sound bites of all time. It has huge meaning to us as a country. Then “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” that’s another piece of it.

The preamble to the Constitution begins with the words “We the people” and talks about providing for the general welfare and the common defense, a whole republican idea of civic responsibility that animated the founders at the beginning and a democratic commitment whereby a republic that really wasn’t all that democratic at the beginning spent 200 years becoming steadily more democratic, with the spread of popular elections, the inclusion first of the unpropertied, then of women, then of African Americans as full participants. These are serious national commitments that have had a lot to do with who we are as a people.

What’s wrong with that picture I just outlined?

SUSAN JACOBY: There’s nothing wrong with it. What’s wrong with it is when it becomes an empty formula justifying whatever you want to justify. I see easily how extending the vote to women, extending the vote to blacks, even — well, it stops at gay rights for people in various religions because they believe the Bible is opposed to it —

E.J. DIONNE: Although, in fact, the advances are extraordinary.

SUSAN JACOBY: But whether you agree with it or not, these things provide a measuring standard, an ideal standard against which you measure yourself.

But when we talk about the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that doesn’t mean that people are going to — there is some consensus on what these things mean, but not entirely. For example, as I’m always pointing out, and as many people don’t know — and if you included this in a school curriculum, the Texas Board of Education would rise up and chop off your heads — the Constitution, “We the people” — and it’s very significant because it’s a founding blueprint for a government, not the broad statement of principles of the Declaration of Independence. It begins with “We the people,” the first document, including a break with our own Articles of Confederation, that attributes governmental power to the people and not to God. This omission of God from the Constitution was debated at every state ratifying convention and left out, not because all of the founders were deists, but because they simply saw religion in terms of how it operated in relation to the state in Europe, and better to leave it out.

But it has come up over and over again. Protestant ministers tried to get not just a God amendment, but a Christian amendment, citing Jesus Christ as the source of authority, in 1862. And you know how we got “In God We Trust” on our coins? Because Lincoln, when he was greeted with this, obviously having a civil war on his hands, wasn’t too interested in having another one. He said, “I’ll take such action on this amendment as my conscience and my duty to my country demand.” His action was to take no action at all. But his secretary of the Treasury came up with the idea that it wouldn’t require a constitutional amendment to put “In God We Trust” on the first two-penny coin. That’s the first time “In God We Trust” enters the public iconography, as a sop to people who wanted to put Jesus Christ in the preamble to the Constitution.

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So there are lots of different ways of looking at what we think of as founding moral principles.

E.J. DIONNE: You wonder if putting that on the currency just proves Kuttner’s point about what’s important in the country.

SUSAN JACOBY: Theodore Roosevelt got called an atheist because he wanted it off the currency, because he was a devout Christian and he objected, as many devout Christians did, to having “In God” on a coin.

ROBERT GEORGE: Obviously I agree with everything you just said, E.J. In fact, if you look, to reiterate the point I made earlier on, at the Declaration, as you point out, though it mentions “Creator” as opposed to just “Providence,” that foundational morality that is carved out there, as we have gone through history — and we just listed those examples — it shows that that foundational morality ultimately ends up trumping the certain religious contemporary moralities of the day. While it’s true that the abolitionists were infused with religious passion, there were also those who looked to the Bible to defend slavery.

But ultimately, after the Civil War, through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, you ultimately saw the Declaration’s assessment of morality actually becoming law.

Even today, the current discussion over gay marriage — it’s interesting. Even some conservatives have come to recognize that because the debate on gay marriage is argued under the rubric of marriage equality — many of these conservatives realize that, given what they have seen in the context of history, they are on the losing side of that. Once an argument ends up becoming a question of equality under the law, the traditional myths, the traditional religions end up having to surrender the ground.

ROBERT KUTTNER: I thought, E.J., you stated that perfectly. As you suggested, the sentiments in the founding documents at the time were aspirational. They were not descriptive of reality. But they were broad enough so that we could grow into the founding sentiments. As the political community, the polity, has broadened to embrace women, African Americans, people without property, gay people, at the same time it has been encroached upon and narrowed by the forces of commercial life. This is epitomized by the Citizens United decision, which harks back to one of the Fourteenth Amendment cases where the Supreme Court, in passing, holds that corporations have the same rights as natural people. But for a hundred years, the courts allowed Congress to regulate so that that was not treated as literally true. For the first time, in Citizens United, the high court said, in fact, it is literally true.

Who was it who said, “I’ll believe that the first time Texas executes its first corporation”? E.J. DIONNE: By the way, there were a number of questions about Citizens United and how we can end the corrupting influence of money in politics. We could spend the whole time talking about that, but I don’t think that’s quite where we want to go, although I would say that reversing Citizens United would be a very good first step. Go ahead.

ROBERT GEORGE: Except I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Money has always been in politics — always. Before Citizens United, the Obama-McCain race, when you added in all the money — I think it was $1.1 billion or something like that. You can’t get money out of politics.

If you want to try to go back all the way to relitigate Buckley v. Valeo, which was a 22

Supreme Court decision that said that money equals free speech, so a limitation on people putting money into campaigns was ultimately a limitation on free speech. That was one of the early decisions that basically brought us in this direction.

Barack Obama in 2008, using the Internet, managed to bring thousands of average citizens into the process, sending in $25 checks, $50 checks, and so forth. Sure, he was still getting $100,000 here, $200,000 there, from rich friends and so forth. But the Internet has also allowed average people to get involved in the political process in an immediate way that they weren’t able to do twenty or thirty years ago, when you had to put your $25 into an envelope and send it in to your candidate or send it in to your party and so forth.

So the individual does have an ability to be involved in a financial way. Of course, it’s not the same thing as all these super PACs, but there is still a democratizing process going on there.

SUSAN JACOBY: I would disagree with that. The importance of small, individual Internet donations has been greatly exaggerated in both politics and — I do a lot of writing about philanthropy. The same thing that you said about politics has been said about philanthropy. But, in fact, small Internet donations account for something like 2 percent of all philanthropy. I don’t think that the fact that the individual can send $5 on the Internet really has anything to do with Bob Kuttner’s larger point.

Something we also ought to think about — you’re certainly right that politics and money have always been intertwined. But money was used in a different way. My Irish grandfather was one of Mayor Daley’s ward heelers in Chicago. What did they do? They certainly used money, but it was used in a very different way — to turn out the vote. So- and-so knew that you show up, it’s checked off, you’re registered, and your Thanksgiving turkey will come to you. There was also a good deal of money spent by the old Cook County Democratic machine, if somebody got sick and was unable to work. Sick benefits, when my grandfather started out — this was the 1930s — were not very common, and so your party organization would bring money to tide you over being sick.

You could call these bribes if you want. But I don’t think it’s quite the same thing. And it’s certainly not the use of money in the same way as the overwhelming — there are people who would say that politics are cleaner today because Romney isn’t bringing Thanksgiving turkeys to people who don’t have them for Thanksgiving. That’s true. There’s nothing personal about the use of money. But the use of money to bombard the airwaves with one negative message after another about the other candidate — all I’m saying is not that money wasn’t important in the past, but it was used in a very different way. I’m not sure that the Thanksgiving turkey to tide over the loyal Democratic voter who was sick was not a better, a more moral, if you will, use of money than the way that money is used today.

E.J. DIONNE: The first time I ever interviewed Barack Obama for a piece was when he was a state senator, and he talked about the change from old-fashioned patronage to what he called pinstriped patronage, which is of an entirely different order, and it tends to be to bond firms and to law firms. They don’t need Thanksgiving turkeys. Go ahead, Bob.

ROBERT KUTTNER: If you go back in American history, this has ebbed and flowed. You have cycles of excess, such as the 1890s, the Gilded Age, followed by cycles of reform. Under Teddy Roosevelt, they passed the Tillman Act, which says that contributions [sic] cannot contribute directly to politics. That held up for a hundred years. You have 23

Watergate, a cycle of excess and a brief spasm of reform, before the courts start to undo it.

But the more you remove the constraints on money overwhelming politics, by definition, it increases the influence of very wealthy people. There’s a wonderful line of Anatole France where he says, “The law, in its majesty, prohibits the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under the bridges of the Seine.”

E.J. DIONNE: I was thinking that Bill Gates, Mayor Bloomberg, Mr. Koch, and I have an equal opportunity to influence the next American election.

I could argue this all night, but I’m the moderator.

Let me read a number of really thoughtful comments. I’ll read them all together, and I would like you to pick out the ones you want to respond to.

Mention has been made of an American morality or a specifically American moral code. What would be the relationship of that code to money?

Next, is it possible that the U.S. founding myth entails a bifurcation of money and morality such that each can appear to be robustly operative in separate spheres?

I think that’s really an important question. I think one of the major issues before humanity at any given time is, how do you protect different spheres of life from encroachment by other spheres?

If American exceptionalism is a myth, why is it that America is always number one when it comes to aiding the afflicted by natural or social disasters? What is the nature of our society and our values that causes this?

For Mr. Kuttner, isn’t the rule of money enabled by a belief in meritocratic freedom? Isn’t it because of this belief that we had the Citizens United ruling?

How does the topic of money, morals, and myth relate to the long-growing lack of comity in the Senate and the House?

ROBERT GEORGE: I think there’s a lot of comedy in the Senate and the House.

E.J. DIONNE: Exactly.

Two others. To what extent does globalization and technology contribute to our becoming a market-driven country?

Lastly — and this is to Bob Kuttner — do you think that the Internet — this goes against something you said earlier, in a way — and its social culture can be the engine for a return to the solidarity you spoke of?

All of you can’t answer all of those questions, but I think they all raised some very interesting points. Each of you can pick up on that collection however you wish.

ROBERT GEORGE: The one that jumped out to me was the person who asked about American exceptionalism in the sense of us being the ones to help afflicted nations, 24

whether it’s sending aid for tsunamis or earthquakes or what have you. I believe that, I think with the notable exception of Ireland, the United States has the highest percentage of regular churchgoers of Western democracies. I don’t think that’s an accident. I think that does speak to the ongoing nature of spirituality, morality, what have you, in the context of the United States, and recognizing that we have been fortunate, that we are a wealthy nation, and so we are willing to do what we have to help those in need when the moment arrives. Again, I think that’s connected to how we see ourselves, both from an exceptional standpoint and from a spiritual standpoint.

E.J. DIONNE: I know that’s a Jacoby moment, but first I’m going to go to Bob.

ROBERT KUTTNER: I think the bifurcation point is very important. The classic modern text on this is Michael Walzer’s wonderful book Spheres of Justice, where Walzer talks about the tradition of blocked transactions — prostitution. It’s something that should not be subject to the norms of commerce, the sin of simony, the sale of ecclesiastical office. You can go back throughout history and point to barriers that were erected, for very good reasons, against the encroachment of commercial principles. Maybe there is something analogous to the separation of church and state which is the separation of market and polity. After all, one person/one vote gets ruined by the norm of one dollar/one vote. If we’re going to have a polity, you can’t just turn the polity into a market.

I’m a bit of an Internet pessimist. Adam Gopnick, I think, in The New Yorker, about six months ago, did one of these incredible review essays, where he took about eight books or maybe ten books of Internet optimists and Internet pessimists, and he did one of those wonderful essays on it.

I think the Internet is just as likely to lead to tribalism and fragmentation and separate, hermetically sealed communities of affinity as it is to a broadening of community.

SUSAN JACOBY: I would like to take up both bifurcation and morality.

I think, on the bifurcation issue, the idea that it is possible for money and morality — and I'm taking your position, really, on this — how can you possibly talk about money and morality operating in separate spheres and not encroaching on each other? They are all mixed up together. I think the idea that one can operate independently of the other or that the influence can be terribly limited is as ridiculous as something else that I think is ridiculous, which is the idea of separate magisteria for science and religion — that science should take care of science’s business and religion should take care of religious business, and never the twain shall meet.

That’s ridiculous. In the Catholic Church, where, in fact, the “separate magisteria” phrase originated, it is not possible, for instance, when you’re talking about something scientific, like in vitro fertilization — if you’re a scientist making the judgment that that’s a good thing, you are also making a moral judgment that it is a good thing, because in vitro fertilization, which ends up in the most intimate spheres of our lives, is not merely a scientific question.

In the same way, if you’re the Catholic Church or any church saying, “I don’t want to interfere in science, but in vitro fertilization is wrong because,” you are making a moral judgment that encroaches on science.

So the idea of limiting spheres to one or the other — I think it’s an exact analogy between 25

money and morality. I don’t know whether this bifurcation is implied in the nation’s founding documents, but I know it won’t fly today.

I am also an Internet pessimist. I certainly think that one of the real tendencies of the Internet is that people only look at things that they already agree with. If you have ever had a column on the Internet, I can see that very, very, very well.

ROBERT KUTTNER: Wait a minute, though. Are you saying we should not try to prevent encroachments that ruin the norms of a sphere where the encroaching party doesn’t belong? Should we not try to limit — church and state, which is what you’re passionate about —

SUSAN JACOBY: Yes, but it’s hard to do. That’s all I’m saying.

ROBERT GEORGE: But what would your example of a place where money doesn’t belong in a certain sphere? What would be your example?

ROBERT KUTTNER: I would limit campaign finance, obviously, because it ruins politics.

ROBERT GEORGE: But I guess that gets into the idea of whether money is free speech or not. That’s another topic.

SUSAN JACOBY: I don’t think money is free speech. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to limit certain encroachments. I’m not talking about church and state. I think that is a legal issue where you can very clearly limit things. But you cannot, for example, much as I would like to keep religion out of politics — I would love to, but it’s absolutely impossible.

Of course, there are lots of things I would like to do. I would like to place a limit on all campaign spending, period.

E.J. DIONNE: I see a looming presence here.

I want to just say two quick things, one on this whole issue that there are limits of what we can spend money on. Justice in the courts is a classic. There’s an old story I heard in New York about the corrupt judge who was given $10,000 by one lawyer and $5,000 by the other lawyer. He called the two lawyers and said to the $5,000 lawyer, “If you give me another $5,000, we can have this trial on the level.”

That’s a sphere where we don’t want money to rule.

My answer to the question, “What rules America?” is that argument rules America. I have always been taken by a writer called Glenn Tinder, who said that we needed to create the attentive society, which, he said, is a place that leaves room for strong conviction, but acknowledges our need both to give and receive help on the road to truth.

I want to thank Bob and Robert and Susan for helping us along that road.

PEGGY STEINFELS: Well-deserved applause, that’s for sure.

I just have a few little kudos and commercials before we all get up and leave. Those of 26

you who are regulars know that these things work very well. One of the reasons they do is that we have a great program manager, Patricia Bellucci, and our program assistant, Monica Hanna, who has been a wonderful aide.

I will also just very briefly tell you that our next event is Wednesday, April 25. It’s called “Taking Offense: When Art and the Sacred Collide.” That’s going to be really juicy. The speakers will be Camille Paglia, art critic and author, and Dana Gioia, former director of the National Endowment for the Arts.

I also want to call your attention to a conference that the Curran Center up at Rose Hill will present on Saturday afternoon, March 24, called “Still Alive at 60: Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood,” a symposium and a celebration.

There are flyers on the table in the back. There are also flyers for an event that almost exactly follows on our topic tonight. On April 24, the Center for Ethics Education and for Electoral Politics and Democracy will have an all-day conference called “Money, Media” — and they’re breaking the alliteration here — “and the Battle for Democracy’s Soul.” Please pick up a flyer and take a look at those as things that will interest you.

Once again, let us join in thanking our panel and our moderator.

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