Virginia Festival of the Book 2014 - World Politics

Last month in Charlottesville, the Virginia Festival of the Book hosted more than 200 programs on a wide range of topics, including authors of fiction and non-fiction, literary agents, and children's book authors.

I attended with video camera in hand to record some of the proceedings -- it's impossible to attend more than a handful of events during the five-day festival -- and belatedly post them here.

The first program I attended was on Wednesday, March 18, on the topic "The United States in the World."

The panel discussion was sponsored by the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership at the University of Virginia and moderated by Sorensen's executive director, Bob Gibson, a former political reporter for The Daily Progress.

The panelists were UVA political scientist James Ceaser, talking about his book, After Hope and Change: the 2012 Elections and American Politics; University of Mary Washington Professor Stephen Farnsworth on The Global Presidency: International News and the U.S.Government; Stanford historian Robert Rakove discussing Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World; and former Ambassador Francis Rooney, who presented The Global Vatican: An Inside Look at the Catholic Church, World Politics, and the Extraordinary Relationship Between the United States and the Holy See.

James Ceaser spoke first:

(For my post-panel interview with Ceaser, visit Examiner.com.)

Stephen Farnsworth spoke next, about how foreign news media organizations view the American president and U.S. foreign policy:

Previous posts about the Virginia Festival of the Book in earlier years can be seen here.

Robert Rakove then discussed his new book about U.S. policy toward the non-aligned world in the 1960s, focusing on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations:

The fourth speaker was Francis Rooney, who served as U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See during the administration of George W. Bush:

(My post-panel interview with Ambassador Rooney is also available to read on Examiner.com.)

Finally, the four panelists fielded questions from the audience on the mezzanine of the University of Virginia book store:

Previous posts about the Virginia Festival of the Book in earlier years can be seen here.

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Author Interview: Jonathan Rauch on his reissued 'Kindly Inquisitors'

Jonathan Rauch

Twenty years after it was first published, a new, expanded edition of Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought is now available as an ebook, with an ink-and-paper edition coming out in March 2014.

Jonathan Rauch, the author of Kindly Inquisitors and other books (including Demosclerosis and his 2013 memoir, Denial: My 25 Years without a Soul), spoke to me recently following a panel at the Cato Institute, in which he discussed his book and what has happened with regard to free speech and censorship in the last two decades with Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and Brian Moulton of the Human Rights Campaign.

After the panel, Rauch explained what inspired him to write the book in the first place.

When, in the late 1980s, “Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses and received a fatwa (essentially a death sentence) from Ayatollah Khomeini,” he said, “I thought that the West did not know how to respond to that. It could defend the laws of free speech but it wasn't defending the ideas of free speech. People were saying things like, 'Well, a death sentence on Rushdie is certainly offensive and wrong but Rushdie himself was offensive to Muslims,' and so forth. And I realized that a lot of people didn't understand why we have this idea of letting people say offensive stuff.”

One of the concepts Rauch introduces in Kindly Inquisitors is what he calls “liberal science.”

He explained that “most discussions of free thought and speech start and end with the U.S Constitution” but he tries “to go a little deeper and look at society's method for producing knowledge and adjudicating disputes about fact, which is in some ways the most important thing we do” – for instance, disagreements about whether Christianity or Islam is “the right religion.”

Historically, he said, the method of “settling disputes like that was war.”

By contrast, “liberal science substitutes an open-ended, rule-based, social process in which everybody throws out ideas all the time and we subject them to criticism. We kill our hypotheses rather than each other. This turns out both to be spectacularly good at mobilizing intellectual talent to find and promote good ideas and spectacularly good at defusing what otherwise would be political, often violent, conflicts.”

Liberal science, he said, is the term he coined “for the whole intellectual network we have that seeks truth in Western liberal cultures.”

He compares it to two other major social institutions for “allocating resources and adjudicating social conflicts.”

In economics, he said, “market systems are in the business of allocating resources and they use open-ended rules of exchange to do that.”

In politics, he noted, “democracies are in the business of allocating coercive political power and they use the exchange of votes and compromise to do that.”

Parallel to those two systems, he added, “liberal science is in the business of adjudicating questions about who's right and wrong and they use the exchange of criticism.”

These three systems, Rauch explained, “all have in common that it shouldn't matter who you are. Anyone can participate, there's no special authority, and no one gets the final say. No one can stand outside the system and say, 'Here's the final result.'”

The result is “always subject to change. It's a big rolling social consensus.”

Since Kindly Inquisitors was first published in 1993, there has been a major, positive change in the intellectual environment, Rauch said.

“In the last twenty years there's been a retreat by active ideologues who favored censorship and speech controls,” he said. Those views have “been replaced with a more refined case that focuses more specifically on how minorities can be hurt when hate speech rises to a certain level of prevalence in society. It's called the 'hostile environment doctrine.'”

In preparing the new edition of his book, Rauch “decided to take a really hard look at that because I think it's right now the biggest and most serious challenge to people like me who advocate very robust freedom of speech.”

He wanted to find out, “from a minority point of view, which is better: a wide open system where people are free to say hateful things about me and often do, or a more controlled system where you've got some people in charge trying to protect me from that?”

His conclusion, “based on the history of the last twenty years for gay rights” is that “there's no contest. We're much better off as minorities when our speech and the other side's speech are [both] protected because we win those arguments, and we're worse off when that process is interfered with.”

The expanded edition of Kindly Inquisitors includes a new foreword by syndicated columnist George F. Will and a new afterword by Jonathan Rauch. It is available now in both Nook and Kindle formats and a print version will be released next year by the University of Chicago Press.

(An earlier version of this interview appeared on Examiner.com.  A complete audio recording is available as a podcast through Bearing Drift.)

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Author Interview: Grove City Political Scientist Paul Kengor on His Latest Book, 'DUPES'

Research in the archives of the Soviet Comintern led Grove City College political scientist Paul Kengor to write his most recent book, DUPES: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.

At the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, Kengor autographed copies of DUPES and his previous book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. (See "Author Interview: Professor Paul Kengor on ‘The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism,'" published March 3.)  He also took a few minutes to talk to me about his research.

Collusion
Looking at the Communist International’s files on the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Kengor said, “I got to the very first reel of microfiche and it was obvious” that “there was a very close collusion between the American Communist Party and the Soviet Communist Party,” corroborating the views held by anti-Communists throughout the twentieth century.

“In fact,” Kengor pointed out, “the very first document you get in the microfiche are the comrades in Chicago in September 1919 sending a letter to the comrades in Moscow at the Comintern, saying, basically, ‘We did it, we did it!’”

The document he cites is included in his book, and it celebrates the founding of the Soviet Union by the Communist Party and predicts that “America will be communist soon.” Those who wrote that letter, Kengor said, were “thrilled about this.”

As he continued in his research, he explained, he discovered “an eye opener.”

Cynical, shrewd, conniving
It showed that the Communist Party USA “very carefully, cynically, shrewdly, in a very conniving way, targeted American liberals and progressives for manipulation.”

Kengor was careful to note that “the liberals and progressives weren’t communists.”

They were, however, “also on the Left” and were therefore targeted in “a very deliberate campaign that went on for a long, long time and, I would argue, even to some extent takes place today, where the communists would lie to the liberals and progressives.”

The communists “wouldn’t tell them that they were communists. They very intentionally tried to mislead and manipulate them and with tremendous success, especially among academics (Columbia University, in particular), and also sadly among the religious left, the social-justice religious left,” Kengor said.


‘Biggest suckers of them all’
He added that, “as one veteran investigator of the American communist movement told me for this book, the religious left were the biggest suckers of them all, especially the mainline Protestant denominations.”

Groups like the National Council of Churches, he said, “fell over and over and over again for the wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

Kengor plans to do more research on the churches during the Cold War, and his next project will “probably be a follow up to DUPES -- but I need to people need to buy DUPES for me to have the incentive to follow it up.”

‘Sad state’ of reading
The author then took an opportunity to lament the current state of publishing and reading.

“It’s a very frustrating thing right now,” he said. “People are not buying books, so you’ll spend years researching all this information” but even enormous publicity for the book “doesn’t always translate into sales.”

The problem is, Kengor said, “if people aren’t going to read these things, you wonder if you should even bother writing them.”

Consequently, he is evaluating his next project based on how well DUPES does.

“I’m finding that to get the word out there,” he said, “to spread the word on what’s in the book, you have to do countless op-ed pieces, countless media interviews, countless radio interviews, [and] do Q&As because people aren’t buying books.”

Instead of buying books, he said, people are “watching TV and reading things off the internet.”

That, he concluded, is “a very sad state.”

(This article appeared in a slightly different form on Examiner.com on February 27, 2011.)

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