Welcome to Free Thoughts, a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it from the Cato Institute and libertarianism.org. I'm Aaron Powell. I'm Trevor Burrus. Joining us today is Professor Jacob T. Levy of McGill University. He's the author of the new book, Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom. Welcome to Free Thoughts. Thank you very much for having me. Your book's about a central tension you've identified within the liberal intellectual tradition and you sum that up towards the end, you write, the core claim of this book is that a full liberal theory of freedom cannot do without the insights of either rationalism or pluralism and yet these are probably impossible to fully reconcile. So why don't we just start by having you explain to us what that sentence means. All right. So first I'll explain what rationalism and pluralism mean in that context. The book is organized around the idea that there are competing traditions within liberal thought, one of them more trusting of the modern rationalizing state form as a way of bringing quality before the law and liberation from local tyrannies and local despotisms through centralization and uniformity, especially legalized uniformity and the other a pluralist tradition that places more confidence in the freedom that has to be found in voluntary associations, in churches, in cultural groups, and in local and provincial levels of government, thinking that the variation that we find there is more the product of free people making free choices than it is a sign of local tyranny and exceptionalism from the law. It would be an okay characterization to say that rationalism then would be focusing on the role of the state is to protect the rights of individuals and the pluralism would specifically you know rights to freedom from violence and freedom of expression and all the things that we talk about every day at the Cato Institute but then the pluralist would focus more on a right to freedom of association. Yes. The freedom of association is an individual right. It's a way of building a kind of rights of groups out of the rights of individuals to come together and do things together. The freedom of a church is a collective corporate freedom but it's built out of the religious freedom of individuals who wish to come worship together in the same way, in the same light according to a common authority structure, a common set of beliefs about authoritative scripture and so on. The rationalist tradition though would look at a church and worry about the authority and the power that a priest might hold over parishioners or that the religious tradition as such holds over say women and children within the tradition and want the state to act against the religious tradition for the sake of protecting as you say the freedom, the autonomy, the development, the individuality of the members of the organization. When reading your book I kept thinking of the Amish as an interesting example of the tension because I have described I think a similar thing in some of my talks and saying on one level we could try to create a system wherein from the top roughly speaking we try to create a floor or some sort of guarantee of rights. On the other one we could create a system where there's just a bunch of little groups and we let them be pluralistically, individualistically or group identity maintained like the Amish and the Amish are not, they're the Amish, they're not libertarian, they're not democrat, they're not socialist, they have a bunch of different things and they're allowed to do their own thing and are you saying basically that the fear there is whether or not we should go into the Amish and stop them from being oppressive if they're being from a top down situation, if they're being oppressive in some way or just let them flourish in their own way. We have a concern that the members, the individual members of the Amish from a liberal perspective might not be genuinely autonomous or free because they've been indoctrinated into the society that radically limits the kind of lives open to them. That's right. We start by asking the question whether the rules are oppressive. The Amish are constituted by their rules. That's what it means to be Amish, to live a life according to a very elaborate set of rules and restrictions and religious beliefs. Rules are expressed as chosen by the adult members of the Amish. You have to freely choose your way into baptism after you're 18, routinely Amish teenagers will get some exposure to the outside world before deciding to come back. But the rules are very, very stringent. If they were the laws of a state, we would say that it was an extremely oppressive tyrannical state, but they're not. We can look at it through one eye and say, this is really a very illiberal, conservative, restrictive society. These aren't fully free people. Or we can look at it through the other eye and say, these are people choosing a thing to do with their lives. And the thing they're choosing to do with their lives involves following norms, living according to values. And that's one of the things that free people can do. That has to be right. No matter what else is true, it has to be the case that free persons can choose to live according to norms and values and rules. But then they create a community that is self-perpetuating. New people are born into the community who come to know fewer and fewer choices over time. The ability of someone to choose to leave well into adulthood is significantly compromised. It's one thing to say you have a choice once when you're 18, but what happens to the 40-year-old, the 50-year-old who comes to wish for something new and not have the resources, that there's something true in both of those is part of the claim of the book. Now, what makes them both liberal then? They're both concerned with the freedom of their members. The ability to choose the conservative life, to choose the religious life, that's one of the things that the liberally free person must be able to choose. It's not the case that liberalism somehow says, you're only free if you are choosing radical libertinism. It's not the case that only if you recreate your life every day, are you a free person. Free persons can make commitments. That means you sign up for rules. This is true in as elementary cases as free persons can sign contracts. They can limit their freedom tomorrow for the sake of a project that they wish to be pursuing today and tomorrow. That's a liberal vision. But the liberal vision is also genuinely concerned with oppression and domination and, to put it in the affirmative light, with the development of individuality. There's a sense in which the liberal looks at the Amish and says, you're not wholly free people even though you've created this situation freely. How do we distinguish an intermediate group? I believe you call it like the Amish from a state. Because you said if we thought of the Amish as a state, they would be a very repressive state and certainly an illiberal state. But don't people choose to participate in the state that they live in? They have the option of exit in most cases, especially in the western world. So what's the difference? And then why do we, why do liberals say the state's not allowed to be oppressive potentially in these certain ways, but the Amish are? A lot of traditional answers here have to do with the coerciveness of states' abilities to punish. An intermediate group normally within a liberal society. When faced with a member who refuses to obey the rules, has no punishment more extreme than, say, expulsion and shunning. A club, a society, they can expel a member, they can excommunicate a would-be believer, but then the person is free to go along their way. The church or the club or the university, they don't have prison sentences, they can hand out. That's a distinction with some real moral weight, and I do think that that does a lot of work. It doesn't do quite as much work as people have sometimes thought. Because the intermediate societies gain legal personality, they gain legal rights of their own. And their ability to persist as corporate bodies, as legally organized entities, means that they call on the legal enforcement mechanisms of the state. We've seen this a few times when dissenting members of a religious group, for example, women dissenting from the rules of an orthodox Jewish synagogue or of a mosque about where women can pray. Would say, we too are orthodox Jews, we too are Muslims. We are going to move into the area of the synagogue or the mosque, where we're not supposed to be. And then the officials of the synagogue or the mosque as the legally authorized representatives of that corporate body, if push comes to shove, if things get far enough, can call in the police to take the women away. If things get really extreme, they can arrest the women for trespassing. That is, the coercive punishment isn't entirely off the table. And so in the book, I do take seriously the difference between coercive punishment and voluntary punishments like excommunication. But I do think that states are on a continuum with other groups. They're not morally utterly different. That's part of what generates the tension within the book. The view that says states are just morally magically completely other, has sometimes gone along with saying, and therefore associations can do whatever they want in terms of the book. That would mean only the pluralist vision is right because we can't define anything that happens within the groups as unfree. And I don't think that's true. Moreover, I offer some reasons in the book to think that local governments and provincial governments are even closer to intermediate groups on this spectrum, which suggests that the state form isn't morally completely alien to other kinds of group social organization. Do these two different traditions, I mean, you call them irreconcilable and we'll get into kind of the genesis of them. But it seems to me that they could be coming from the different concerns about where the danger lies more. And they're not coming from different value systems. I mean, if they're both liberal, they can't be to some extent.  But is it really just a concern about where the slippery slope lies? If the slippery slope lies with the pluralistic tradition or the slippery slope lies with centralized power that may start doing things that you don't want it to do, so it's just sort of emphasis about the dangers of the future? I think that's right, and I spend a lot of part one of the book arguing that we should think of the traditions in terms of where they view dangers. A lot of the other ways of talking about these kinds of issues in political theory and political philosophy have tended to treat the two views as coming from utterly different value systems. One of them is individualistic and one is collective, for example. And I think that that's a serious mistake. Association is generated out of individual free choices and free persons, as I've said, are free to choose rules and values and norms. Or one of them is concerned with individual autonomy, understood as a strong commitment to the person creating themselves. And I think that the really radical version of individual autonomy that people talk about in that setting is ultimately incoherent because we are none of us creating ourselves holy from scratch. We're all socialized. And so what happens is the idea of autonomy is wielded in very opportunistic and hypocritical ways, for example, to say, we secular white Westerners, we are autonomous, we choose our lives. Whereas you brown people with your religions, you seem not to be autonomous because you're doing what your parents did. Well, most of us do what our parents did most of the time. So I'm at some pains to say there aren't different fundamental values. These are both flowing from common liberal values. And the difference is then grounded in a different kind of normative sociology, an account of what groups are like and what states are like, what their patterns are, what their habits are, under what kinds of social conditions you would expect to find really significant abuses coming from the state or under what kinds of conditions you'd expect to find really significant abuses coming from intermediate groups. And that seems like it would have something to do with voice and exit, possibly, in the Hirschman sense that in one of these you can leave, at least that should be maybe a fundamental right that the liberal order must maintain. And the other one you should try to change, essentially, from within. There's something to that, but lots of states and lots of intermediate groups draw on both. It's not the case that states are always smaller than what I'm, or it's not the case that states are always larger than what I'm calling intermediate groups. A lot of intermediate groups are transnational. The Roman Catholic Church is very much larger than most states in the world. Exit is hard. Exit is tremendously costly. And we say that exit is hard from states, partly psychologically, partly economically, partly because it's hard to find a place to go. Well, exit is hard from the Catholic Church, too. If you're still a believer, but you have some real objection to some component, what do you do? Well, what you do is voice. Our relationship to intermediate groups isn't just like our relationship to economic firms on the marketplace, which was Hirschman's standard case of cases where we dissent using exit. Yeah, I don't like Burger King. I leave Burger King. I go to McDonald's. That's right. I don't try to change Burger King from within and take it over and vote about it and everything. But my relationship to my church isn't really like that very much, even in the United States where there's a tremendous proliferation of Protestant nominations that are very close to one another. And yes, if you don't like something about your local church, you can find something that's a little bit different. But still, we take it more seriously than that. We do try to exert some voice. We do try to change our intermediate organizations. So given that these definitions scale, and as you said, the Catholic Church is much larger than many, as an intermediate group is much larger than many states, does pluralism, I guess, eat? Rationalism at some point, because these countries themselves are, I mean, we're embedded in these things, these cultural groups, we come out of this liberal tradition, but that's just a tradition that we were a part of. And so just taking pluralism seriously at some point means saying something like, well, even these individual rights that we seem to care about, this autonomy that we seem to care about, those are just particular factors of this one intermediate group that we happen to be a part of that maybe stretches back to the dawn of time. But it's a tradition, and it's just like the Catholic tradition, and so we should treat it the same as we would treat any other intermediate group. I don't quite think that. I see what you're up to. I do think it's important to treat the state as being continuous with other kinds of groups, and as being an entity with a sociology of its own, it's important not to treat it as a lot of philosophers often have as being a kind of disembodied machine for the dispensing of justice, and all we have to do is come up with the right theory of justice to feed into the state, and the state will do the justice. Now, states have patterns and dysfunctions of their own. They're populated by real people, and they have histories. They haven't always existed. They share that with intermediate groups, too. But there is something distinctive about this particular kind of group, the kind of mode of organization that's developed over the course of European modernity since the 1500s or so. It extends to significant bureaucratization and a significant push toward universalism and uniformity within it in a way that isn't mirrored in even very large other groups. The Catholic Church is not prone to the same dysfunctions as a state is. There are other kinds of things we want to worry about. We want to worry about excessive conservatism. We want to worry about the excessive power of priest over parishioner. But what we don't normally find in the church that we do find in states is the trend toward radical centralization, radical uniformity, and a deep determination to know everything about the members in order to make them march in a kind of lockstep. That has to do with the kind of power that the state has at its disposal. It's a contingent matter. It's what the state happened to turn into over the course of the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s. But it does mean that we expect different kinds of dangers from the state than what we expect from the other kinds of intermediate groups. And therefore, I think it's still useful to treat them separately. As a member of the Academy and in Canada, no less, and I don't know if that makes it meaningfully different in terms of the political persuasions of your colleagues and the people you interact with professionally, it would seem to me based on my reading the situation that at least in the political science and somewhat of the political philosophy realm, the preference has been over the last few years for the rationalist viewpoint, at least in the sort of sense of being very afraid of groups and being less about toleration and more about top-down rules. And we see that whether it's toleration on campuses or the move to, let's say, international human rights law or the UN, we need to have a rational order that guarantees a floor for everyone. These groups are a big problem. The feminist tradition has long attacked the family as the source of the problem. The subjugation of the one within the family goes to the rest of society, so we need to be able to get inside the family and not let them. Would you agree that's the general trend right now in political science and political philosophy? I think that there's something in philosophy in particular that tends to be attracted to the model of the state as a justice dispensing machine. They don't think of it as being a statist view. What they think of it as is the articulation of right reasons. And we can't give up on the enterprise of finding the right reasons and the right rules. But then once we've got the right reasons and the right rules, well, here's this handy machine over here that will feed the right reasons and the right rules into. They take the state for granted as being a transparent way to get the right reasons and the right rules expressed in the world. And part of what the pluralist tradition has always emphasized is when states go wrong, the existence of a plurality of groups and sites and locations and organizations within society can provide a variety of kinds of counterbalancing, a variety of kinds of experimentation to find out what better rules are. It emphasizes that we don't know what the right laws would be and there's an emphasis on pluralism as a discovery procedure. I don't think that political science has quite the same tendency. Political scientists study the state for a living and so we're not going to take it for granted in that same invisible, transparent way. We're plenty aware of the pathologies of states and we treat them as part of the analysis. Do you think that there's any sort of transposing of the pluralist or rationalist tradition on to modern political parties or political debates at all or is it always kind of subarosa? Because I could see conservatives talking about the family or conservatives talking about church groups as being the ones seemingly right now talking about the pluralist tradition and not wanting to be forced into association for baking a wedding cake for a day wedding or things like this. It seemed to be coming from more of the pluralist tradition and then the left is coming in on more of the rationalist tradition. Is that mistaken? Let me actually modify that because I was thinking of asking something similar and that one of the things that strikes me about modern politics and thinking about it through this tension that we talked about is groups seem to be so interest groups whether those are social conservatives versus progressives or union membership or whatever the interest groups and the factions that are at play. They're rationalists when they're winning and they're pluralists when they're on the defensive. That's why when you talk about the conservatives, oh, we need this pluralism so that people can choose to live. Well, that's because social conservatism is losing right now. We need the freedom to not marry gay people whereas before the argument was gay people should not be allowed to get married and we're going to use the rationalist state to force that on them. The left wanted pluralism when we wanted what the choice to be beatniks or whatever. But now that they're dominant, we're going to use the rational state because it's no longer pluralism, it's our group is right and all the other groups are wrong. To a first approximation, I think that's a lot closer than a mapping of the distinction on to an ongoing over time left-right distinction. We can see it pretty clearly in the case of federalism which I treat as one importantly distinctive kind of pluralism. If you think that your side controls the central government and is going to go on controlling the central government, then you tend not to be supportive of federalism. You tend to think the central government will give us the answers and the states and the provinces have to fall into line. And on gay marriage, we've seen an astonishingly quick turnaround. Within a generation, we've gone from the Federal Defense of Marriage Act and social conservatives who actively supported a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage even in states where domas hadn't been passed at the state level to the reverse where now the conservative argument is, well, let the last few states that haven't legalized same-sex marriage go on their way. That's a very robust pattern. That doesn't mean that there aren't some other patterns. It very often is the case that conservatives will in particular be sympathetic to the claims of churches and religious groups to be able to govern themselves. But there are other institutions in society. Universities are an important kind of intermediate group. One of my favorite messy cases to talk about these days are the laws that are passed in a few states to mandate that universities allow people with concealed carry handgun permits to carry their guns on campus. That's a way of saying that the university is not its own space with its own rules that professors and students can't come together and agree to a different setting and say, in this space, we think that this is appropriately not bound by the same rules. Like the Amish agree to not exercise a variety of their liberties, we could say in the classroom, we're not going to exercise our liberty to carry handguns. But conservative state legislatures are interested in shutting down that institutional autonomy of the universities and instead mandating a rule about who can carry guns where. Let's talk a little about the history because a significant part of the book is the genesis of these two doctrines. And maybe Montesquieu is a central figure, but where does the pluralist tradition do you think, what are the legs of that it usually stands on, the philosophers and the ideas? The ideas come second in my telling. I'm interested in first showing that medieval Europe, late medieval Europe from about 1,000 or 1,100 onward, generated a lot of what we now think of as intermediate institutions, including institutions that are continuous with the ones we have today, the church, cities, universities, above all, and that they already had proliferated by the time the modern state started to coalesce in the 1500s or so. Against a vision that we get, sometimes from reading just the history of political thought, especially the social contract theorists, that says before the state there was nothing. Turns out that before the state there was quite a lot and quite a lot that we now think of as the pluralistic intermediate sphere. It wasn't an intermediate. There wasn't a state over it, but those institutions did exist in their variety of forms with their variety of functions. Then I tell an intellectual history that partly builds on what happens when the state shows up and when the early modern absolutist monarchs start to realize what they can do with this new organizational form, what they want to do is to subjugate all of the other orders of society, make it all orderly and rational and taxable and conscriptible and governable, and therefore eliminate the traditional rights to govern themselves that universities and cities and the church and so on had all had. Then in the fights between the absolute monarchs and their critics, such as the Stuart Kings, and the Whigs, then you start to get the articulation of political ideas that say, we have an ancient constitutional order here. Those words are always used, ancient constitution. That's right. In England, the ancient constitution is the common law, and in continental Europe it is grounded, obviously not in the common law, but just in the traditional rights to govern themselves of the provinces and all the rest. This brings together groups that had not seen themselves as allies before. The church and the cities had not been friends, ideologically, intellectually during the High Middle Ages, but in the face of centralizing absolutist monarchs, they discovered they have common cause in defense of what they partly imagine to have been the ancient constitution. It has to be an imagination because they're projecting an order backward when there didn't need to be an order, when there wasn't an overarching state and there wasn't a unified legal structure to tie it all together. The social contract theorists, Hobbes and Locke especially, they are offering in different ways accounts of the justification of the state and of the modern state, and they wipe out everything else that isn't normatively derived from the agreement that we all make together all at once. A church or a city or a university isn't derived from that universal national agreement. It's built on what its members have done. Their critics, the Whigs, the common lawyers, the ancient constitutionalists, the critics of the social contract tradition, the critics of the social contract tradition and the critics of absolutism, they draw on a different normative language that doesn't have to do with the idea that we justify everything in society all at once, but rather each of these things has its own justification. Each of these things has its own history and it is the duty of kings to respect the traditional laws that have allowed each of these things to govern themselves. This comes together especially in Montesquieu who I think turns the ancient constitutionalist intellectual tradition from being partly just a political tool into being a full-blown political theory. Tell us more about Montesquieu because he's probably someone that, I mean most of our listeners are probably something about Hobbes, about Locke, about Mill, but Montesquieu. He's also, Spirit of Waz is 1,500 pages long or something like that. It's a pretty diverse work. Yeah, so Phyllis and I, Montesquieu. That's right. It's a very big book and it's also a book that unlike Hobbes, Hobbes is a viathan, doesn't even pretend to be accessible to someone just picking it up. Hobbes thinks that he's discovered a political science that anyone can master just by opening the book the same way that he thinks Euclid discovered a geometry that you could master just from within. A lot of the Spirit of the Laws is history and sociology and if you don't know the proper nouns that he's throwing around, if you don't know the eras that he's talking about, then some of it won't make any sense and the parts that do make sense you won't always understand why he's talking about it at such length. Nonetheless, the Spirit of the Laws is the first really major work of political and social theory of the European Enlightenment and one of the most influential books in the history of European ideas. It more than Leviathan, it more than any other modern book up till its time, offered the idea and the hope of a general social science of modern political and social life. A lot of what Montesquieu's interested in is the constraints that states face in trying to govern complicated societies. He's convinced that legislators and governors and rulers and kings, they try to make their states simpler than they are. They try to govern according to simpler laws that actually make sense. So he's constantly making reference to complexity. One of the most famous parts of this discussion of complexity is the two books, books four and five, about the development of commerce in modern Europe and Montesquieu is cited as the originator of the Ducomeres thesis that commerce tends to soften barbaric mores and encourage peace among nations. That is, he's seeing that there's an area of human activity that isn't just the creation of deliberate decisions by state lawmakers. He says, given that we've had these commercial revolutions in European modernity, how does that shape what the laws should be and what the laws can possibly do? All right, to us in the 21st century, that is a little bit familiar, we can say. Yes, okay, the economy might have laws of its own that constrain what an effective government can actually accomplish. But a lot of the rest of the book is about that too. A lot of the rest of the book is about how the religious habits of the people, how the cultural habits of the people, how the traditions of the people, how the geography and climate of the society, how all of these things put constraints on what it is the lawmaker can hope to create from scratch. And so he's throwing complexity after complexity from one society after another at the reader in order to say, here are things that are relevant that a lawmaker would have to take into account because the world is more complicated than the lawmaker imagines. Well, I see that as somewhat related, although you see kind of is a middle figure, seems the way you described him, but the Scottish Enlightenment figures kind of made these claims too about the organic nature of society and the institutions that develop, whether it's Adam Ferguson or Adam Smith or Hume's work on political thought. Would that be in the more Montesquieu tradition, would you say? Ferguson and Smith were absolutely clear about the amount of the debt that they owed to Montesquieu. Ferguson said at one important point in his essay on the history of civil society, I'm not really sure why I should bother saying anything about this because Montesquieu has already said it. Smith did think that he had important improvements to offer on what Montesquieu had said about commerce, but Ferguson and Smith both drew a lot on Montesquieu's theory of historical change, part of the complexity that Montesquieu offers is to say the laws that make sense in one time won't make sense in another time when all of these cultural and economic and other factors have changed. And therefore what we think of even as justice over the course of centuries or millennia is meaningfully different. The whole legal system has to change from one century to the next. Ferguson and Smith are fully in Montesquieu's debt and open about that. Hume's relationship to Montesquieu is a little bit more complicated. Hume is closer to being contemporary of Montesquieu's and his thought was closer to being fully formed by the time the spirit of the laws came out. There was a lot that he agreed with Montesquieu about, but there were gaps there that don't exist with Ferguson and Smith relative to Montesquieu.  Actually, before we go post Montesquieu, I just want to clarify just to say, so is it Montesquieu's position, because it's very complex and it's hard to get into, and I've tried to read it many times, but is the big constraint on the state, is he concerned with constraints on the state, and is the big constraint on the state humility, like a humility of the rulers to understand that there's more complexity and pluralism out there? Is that an adequate characterization, an accurate characterization? No, there has to be more than that because rulers won't abide by that kind of thing. Montesquieu generally thinks that modern states will be monarchies. He thinks that republics are characteristic of the ancient world and now that we have commerce and now that we have big countries like France and England, we're going to have monarchies. And he says over and over again of monarchies that they are constituted by their intermediate bodies. If you don't have intermediate bodies, and he names the church and the cities and the provinces and the guilds and the nobility, if you don't have those in a monarchy, the monarchy will become a despotism. He doesn't say this will happen when we get a bad monarch. He says it's intrinsic. All of those bodies stand up for their rights. And in standing up for their rights, they help protect the law and they help protect the idea that there are legal limits on what the king or the lawmaker or the central government can do. If they go away, if all you have is an absolute central state and disconnected individuals, despotism necessarily results more or less regardless of how well-intentioned or good-spirited the king is. A lot of the spirit of the laws is barely subtextually an account of how Louis XIV had brought France to the brink of despotism. It is officially subtextual. He never quite says that out loud, but it's barely subtextual and Voltaire hated him for it and spent decades afterwards writing defenses of Louis XIV against Montesquieu's as he took at scurrilous charges. The claim wasn't that Louis XIV had been a bad man, though he does think that Louis XIV was arrogant and a simplifier. It was more fundamentally that Louis XIV had damaged the constitution by attacking all of the decentralized pluralistic intermediate bodies by centralizing the nobility at Versailles instead of leaving them in the countryside, tending to their various responsibilities. In order to get freedom in a modern constitutional monarchy, we were going to have to have pluralism. So then how did we get to where we are today? We where this pluralism seems to have faded somewhat from the way that we talk about things and it seems like, I mean, maybe this is an accident in this country of the American founding and the focus on a social contract theory seems to dominate the way that we think about the state and think about liberalism and think about our freedoms, but how did this ascendancy of the rational approach? So there are a couple of important steps and lurking in the background is always that the state continues to consolidate as an organizational form over the course of modernity. The state that Montesquieu was writing about 50 years before the French Revolution, it was by our standards still a pretty fragmentary, disorganized, non-bureaucratized, non-professional body. Well, they didn't have the technology to really be that overweening. They didn't have the technology in our straight forward sense, but they also didn't have the social technology. There were all kinds of sociological obstacles to the state governing the way that it wanted to govern and these were obstacles that the Jacobins and the French Revolution were going to run headlong into and then try their best to break down. Try to reform society from the ground up by killing all the pluralists. I mean, is that the ultimate rationalist endeavor of the French Revolution? Kill all the pluralistic groups. Restart the calendar. So again, since I'm trying to tell this as an understanding of views within liberalism, I don't want it to be understood just as a story about reactionaries and Jacobins because there are liberal ways of being a rationalist who worries about intermediate group power. The Jacobins were not liberals. They were extreme rationalists, but I don't talk about the Jacobins much in the book because I'm interested in rationalist liberals who I do think have to say some things for themselves in a way that the Jacobins don't. But the French Revolution accelerates the growth of central state power and they figure things sociologically out. They figure out new ways of governing, new mechanisms they have at their disposal that aren't about the invention of computers. They are about, for example, mass conscription and they are about how you can finance a much bigger bureaucratic state that will then have an ongoing census and an ongoing tax base. Those are kinds of technological change, but they're not in our engineering sense technological changes. So the state keeps getting more powerful. That's in the background. The French Revolution also changes the base of legitimation of the centralized and centralizing state. The absolute monarchs hadn't been able to say the reason why I should rule everything is that I am the whole nation. Louis XIV did. It's the state. It's the state. It's the state. But not the nation. It's the state. He said that he was the only source of state legitimacy and state power and the provinces and the cities. They did not have autonomous state powers of throne. But the French Revolution and the nationalistic democracy that comes into being starting at about the turn of the 18th century. That generates the very powerful idea that we the people, a people, should govern itself as a singular. It should govern itself all at once in a unified way. That gives the centralizing state tremendously more normative legitimacy and more popular appeal than the old absolute monarchs had had. That's going to become the primary preoccupation of liberal political theorists in the 19th century. Alexis de Tocqueville here is the most important, but I think that Benjamin Constant is extremely insightful about these things, too. Tocqueville sees the continuities between the old regime absolute monarchs and the new revolutionary state. And he says, under democracy, how would ever be able to resist the power of the centralizing state? Because everyone feels that they're a member of it. And yet, there's something terrible on the horizon, he thinks, when the democratic majority governs itself this way. One of the things he's looking for when he comes to America and talks about the rise of voluntary associations is how a free and equal democratic people can still be pluralists. How there can be pluralism without privilege. And he's tremendously impressed with what the Americans have done. From his initial vantage point, he says, we would have assumed that the Americans already would have fallen into despotism because there aren't any intermediate bodies. There's nothing really robust to stand up against the state, not in this old regime sense of having institutions whose privileges were 1,000 years old. However, the Americans have figured out ways through township government he's very interested in and through churches and through the tendency to associate together to do things in civil society rather than directly lobbying the state to do things for us. He doesn't maintain tremendous optimism that that can be a solution forever. He doubts it can be a solution forever for the Americans and he's pretty sure that France had by that time lost the possibility of just generating it spontaneously. Does that seem to still be the case? Do you think that the new world, the lack of coming up to finding institutions as you find them and having to deal with them and coming across the ocean led the Americas or maybe just the United States to be less into institutions and more about the sort of rationalist theory of liberalism? Yes, but I mean, the United States is a federation and that matters. I think the United States hasn't maintained its federal form as well as some other federations, partly because most other federations have at least one province or state that has a really robust sense of pre-political identity. Well, you live in Quebec, so... I live in Quebec. It is absolutely the case. And Quebec is exactly what I have in mind. Texas. What about Texas? I think that Texas' distinctiveness is mostly sublimated within the South. There certainly are Texas patriots and there are people who wave their Texas flags and talk about Texas's secession. They don't have their own language, though. Not exactly.  That's right. It has mainly expressed itself politically just as Southern white conservatism, whereas Quebec or Catalonia in Spain or Scotland in the U.K. or Bavaria in Germany or any number of linguistically and religiously distinct states in India, these states really systematically... They don't turn their identity into just being part of the left-right coalition at the national level. They say, one of our most important political projects is Quebec. That's right. It's Catalonia, yes. And that has exerted an important balancing force that helps protect federalism in Canada, in Spain and these other countries that I think the U.S. has generally lacked to its disadvantage. But that's not about social contract theory versus not social contract theory. That's about the deliberate decision that was made in the 19th century in the United States that says no state will be admitted to the union until there's a white English-speaking majority. You know, we're not going to let Oklahoma be a state when Oklahoma is Indian country. We're not going to let Hawaii be a state until there's a white settler majority. Or we're not going to let Utah be a state under a theocratic type of regime. That's right. We're really going to break the power of the Mormon church in important ways. We're going to demand that the Mormon church abandon polygamy. We're going to put the Union army outside Salt Lake City and tell them you have to behave like a reformed Protestant domination and not like you have traditionally behaved. You can't be too different and have your own state within the American Union. One thing I was curious about when going to the book is that so we have the tension is we've got this potential threat and both and potential boon to liberty of the centralized power and then the individual group that we might be a part of. But what about the threat between groups? That because the central authority, even if the central authority might be a threat to groups, it might also be supportive of them because it's going to prevent one religious denomination from potentially wiping out in the ways that it might prevent. You know, some of it would prevent some others. It wouldn't, but it's going to act as a referee. Yeah, it's going to set the rules. It's going to enable something that looks like you know, nosy utopia of utopias where we've got the set of rules and that allows the groups to form. So what's the... Absolutely and one of the things that I think is a truth of the rationalist liberal tradition is the idea that the intermediate bodies are better off and are better for us once they become genuinely intermediate. Locke was very insightful about this in talking about religious liberty and the way in which religious liberty was connected to his theory of generating the state all at once and it would be a uniform state for everyone all at once. The religious wars were very bad for people in their religious groups and the end of the religious wars involved in part a strengthening of state power to check what the religious groups could do to each other. It's not only that because the states were also participants in and enablers of the religious wars but it was partly that and there are ways in which the stable uniform legal framework that the modern European state has to offer lets us make better use of what we're going to do in our intermediate group lives. It doesn't come for free and it doesn't come without costs but it does come. I think that's an interesting point of your book and you try to make it clear that this is a taxonomy more than a... You're not saying this one's better than the other one. You seem to have a preference for the pluralism tradition but that's not what the book is about and maybe this conversation because the libertarian fear of the rationalist state is seems like we're saying oh, the pluralism one is clearly correct but maybe one explains... Actually, that doesn't strike me as... I mean, I would argue that most of us most libertarians tend to argue more from within the rationalist. I think it depends on who. You know that the government's there to protect our rights and that means protecting us that shutting down the power of these powerful interests to dominate our lives that it should set these hard and fast rules and it should make sure that we're free to pick and choose and that kind of radical autonomy and self-authorship seems to be very central to modern libertarians. I'm delighted this exchange happened this way because this is exactly where I wrote the book. That's right. I genuinely don't think... I really, really genuinely don't think that the pluralist rationalist tradition... distinction maps on to, for example, the distinction between libertarian and egalitarian kinds of liberalism. A long time before the book came out, I had an article first developing the rationalist pluralist distinction partly by arguing just this. Among contemporary libertarians, you could say, who owes a greater debt to Hayek and who to Nozick? Hayek is a pluralist. Hayek mistakenly thought that his pluralism was what market liberalism was all about and there's an important influential, interesting and wrong chapter in the Constitution of Liberty that treats his understanding of pluralism as being constitutive of what it is to be a classical liberal or a market liberal. But when you start from a theory of robust individual rights and you say, what we need is the fully coherent Night Watchman State that will protect all of our rights and do nothing else, that is absolutely a rationalist project and it is a way of treating the state as a justice dispensing machine. If only we get it right, then the state will do what we tell it to do and do nothing else. There really are significant rationalist and pluralist components of contemporary libertarian liberalism as well as other kinds of liberalism. Lurking way in the background of my interest in writing this book is to express the view that libertarian liberalism is continuous with liberalism. That is, it is not the one true air of the liberal tradition that I've talked about. I think that contemporary egalitarian liberalism of the kind that's expressed in John Rawls' theory of justice, of the kind that got politically manifested in the Warren Court resolutions about the American constitutional order, that's a genuine descendant of liberalism and the rationalist pluralist tension is faced in more or less the same ways and in more or less to more or less the same degree by libertarian and egalitarian liberals alike and in showing that we can start to see some of the ways in which the difference over how much the redistributive state is going to spend on alleviating poverty is not the only or the most important difference within liberalism and it's certainly not the difference between some who are truly the liberals and the heirs of liberalism and others who are alien to it. Now, going back to Aaron's first question, which I think is a kind of good last question, is we went off and around and whatever, we talked about the irreconcilability. So you think these two things are irreconcilable. Why is that the case and what should we learn from that if there's a normative lesson to learn from that going forward? The rationalist and pluralist views, if I'm right, are based on accounts of what can go wrong in states and intermediate social groups. They can both be correct about those things and that's not going to free us from the need to do something in a particular case to side with the state or the group in some particular dispute. But unlike a theory that's built up from first principles about individual rights, this is going to be the kind of model in which we might just be faced with a choice of bads and a weighing that is not determinant. The thing that we do to check the intermediate group from oppressing its members might be justified and yet might leave us with a stronger state that we had before in ways that we genuinely want to worry about and vice versa. Moreover, I think that the psychology and sociology of worrying about intermediate group life and the psychology and sociology about worrying about the state are really genuinely different kinds of insights. One of the pairings I talk about in this book is between John Stuart Mill, who among 19th century liberals was especially important in seeing the ways that the family and a traditional culture can be oppressive. He understood that the traditional patriarchal family was a site of household despotism, robust critic of slavery, robust critic of the cultural conservatism of Victorian England and understood that that could be repressive in its own right. And Lord Acton, the British Whig liberal historian who was one of the most important theorists of federalism in the liberal tradition. He rightly saw what Mill did not see that the emerging European nation state, the drive to nationalism and to break up the large multinational empires into democratic nation states, that that was going to be significantly oppressive because it was going to unify nation and state and therefore make states seem more legitimate than they really were and generate nationalistic fervor in support of states that are going to be bad for minorities, all things that turned out to be true. He was very, very good on understanding religious freedom and the freedom of churches to govern themselves. And in the book I talk about a correspondence that Acton entered into after the U.S. Civil War with Robert E. Lee. And it is an extraordinary depressing set of documents. It's obsequious. Acton says he mourns more for the steak which was lost at Richmond. That is in the crucial battle that decided that the Civil War was truly going to end as it did. I mourn more for the steak which was lost at Richmond than I celebrate that which was protected at Waterloo. For a 19th century Englishman, a 19th century member of the British House of Lords to say that, the American Civil War turned out worse than the defeat of Napoleon turned out well is mind-boggling. And it's not that Acton didn't know that slavery was wrong. He'd always been clear that slavery was wrong. But he thought that the protection of federalism was so important for protecting human liberty going forward in the era of mass democracy in the era of the emergence of the modern state that he was willing to just completely swallow the concern about slavery in order to say, the Confederacy really needed to establish robust state rights. And now that we have the triumph of the unified, centralized nation-state under Lincoln, now we're all doomed. I think that the sources of his insight and his blindness are the same source. And the same might well be true of Mill's ability to see what's wrong with the family and his inability to see what's wrong with nationalism. There's a psychology and a sociology that you bring to the table. If Mill and Acton, who I regard as both having been great, tremendous, important, brilliant thinkers, if they could both go so far wrong, then I'm inclined to say there's a reason to doubt that we're going to get it right. If they couldn't see both truths at the same time, then even though I tend to wear the pluralist side, I'm not willing to hubristically think I'm going to be the one to get it right and to square the circle and to solve all the problems at once. My pluralism undoubtedly generates blind spots of its own. Thank you for listening. If you have any questions, you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod. That's Free Thoughts P-O-D. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.


If a broken arrow message is ever flashed, signaling a nuclear weapons accident within the United States, will we be ready to cope with it? Will we be ready? That's the question we sought to answer in the Nevada desert. On the occasion, a joint Department of Defense Department of Energy nuclear weapons accident exercise. The doctrine for response forces at such an accident is straightforward enough in outline. You put out the fire, remove and treat casualties, establish command and control, contain the contamination, render the weapons safe and start recovery operations.  What a potential for serious complications. For we're talking about an event that literally explodes in the news media and in the public mind. Our government, from the White House on down, demands a quick, competent response to contain the danger first, then eliminate it and finally recover from it. Now here is the Air Force Unseen Commander at the exercise site. Roger, the exercise you are about to see was the first of its kind, unique in scope and duration and consequently unique in its great importance to all who share responsibility in nuclear weaponry. Its purpose was to test our responses, to play out from the first May Day call to the final cleanup, the complete scenario of actions required by a major nuclear accident. From this exercise, we all learned valuable lessons. It showed how critically important is each individual's function and the total effort. It proved that your personal response, your decisions, your recall of what you learned in training can make the difference between a widespread calamity or a swiftly contained local incident. The basic facts were these. An Air Force C-141 with seven crew members crashed and burned in the Nevada desert. A board was a group of nuclear weapons being ferried to a depot, six complete weapons and components for two more, from the inventories of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the Marines. The D-Day clock thus began ticking at 0955 hours with a potential broken arrow message from Nellis Air Force Base. Information went out within half an hour when a reconnaissance helicopter from the nearby Army Camp, Fort Mercury, found the wreckage 30 miles away. The grim message was, no evidence of life, aircraft badly broken up. The first word of a nuclear weapons accident goes to the National Military Command Center. Then to the top most levels, including the Secretary of Defense, the White House Situation Room and the JNACC, the Joint Nuclear Accident Coordinating Center. Follow-on alerts in this case went to over 50 different agencies, commands and units in the armed services, the Departments of Energy, Justice and State and several Nevada offices. The nature of the event is such that a shockwave runs through our whole government structure, which unless contained can soon expand into a state of public alarm. First response was from the nearest military unit, which happened to be the Army. By helicopter and ground vehicle, their response team arrived at the site by noon. Craters near the wreckage showed that high explosive detonations had occurred. The question of contamination was quickly answered when the first readings showed 2,000 counts per minute on the Alpha Radiation Detectors. Anti-contamination suits and masks must be worn. That radiation was real, not simulated. It was radium-223 with a half-life of 11 days. It had been spread in a calculated pattern over the crash site at a level that ensured against health hazards, but at the same time gave real instrument readings. We should note at this point that this exercise included all services and the Department of Energy and was evaluated by umpires from these agencies. Army Brigadier General Carlson, as senior military officer present, assumed responsibility as the initial on-site commander. Military police set up a partial security cordon and would complete it as soon as the contamination profile could be drawn. Army control team members now properly suited up, taped and masked, moved onto the crash site and within an hour found three bodies of crewmen and two nuclear weapons. One army weapon pinned under the wing and one Air Force weapon half-buried in the ground. Now two civilians appeared in the area unexpectedly. They were promptly stopped by the MPs, but proved to be the owners of this land and soon wanted to talk about damage claims. One of them had picked up some contamination and had to be held for his own safety until the decontamination unit was set up. Meanwhile, a steady stream of reports, notifications and requests for additional support were going out from the Army's Field Command post. Among them was a request to the Federal Aviation Administration to create a prohibited air corridor over the crash site, 10 miles wide and 10,000 feet high. Normally, we have no authority on private property, but a national defense area may be established in an accident like this where nuclear weapons are involved. Now the complexity of the operation was growing by the hour. The question arose as to whether the county coroner could handle contaminated bodies. Explosive ordinance disposal teams from the Army, Navy, Marines and the Air Force were called for since weapons belonging to each service were involved. The Department of Energy alerted weapons design people from the Livermore Laboratory, Sandia and Los Alamos. At Nellis Air Force Base, their disaster response force assembled and departed for the crash site to support the Army team. By late afternoon, a Navy EOD team arrived from China Lake Naval Station in California. Shortly after, the Army's Alpha team came in from Fort Bragg, North Carolina to aid in the Radiation Survey and Contamination Control Line operations. The newsmen were not far behind, asking for interviews and for a look at the wreckage. They wanted names of casualties, cause of the crash and details on potential radiation hazards to civilians living downwind. An official statement from General Carlson's Public Affairs Officer, cleared by higher authority, was issued to the news media. It stated the basic facts as they were then known and acknowledged that nuclear weapons were involved. Now it's obvious that a very large logistical effort was needed to feed, shelter and sustain our forces here. In a real nuclear accident, the crunch would be felt in a few hours. Food, clothing, tents, water, vehicles, fuel, sanitation, expanded communications, all would be urgently needed right now. To save exercise time, a tent city had been set up previously to shelter 400 people. It's true that such a camp wouldn't exist until several days later at a real accident site, but its presence didn't affect the central objectives of the exercise. And in fact, there would still be plenty of discomfort, sleeplessness and cold rations to go around. A second Navy EOD team had arrived by now from Hawthorne, Nevada. After the third and fourth nuclear weapons were found, first damage assessments were made and render safe procedures were started. All seven of the aircrew casualties were located by the search teams. Telephone lines were laid to ease the problem of communication with security guards far out in the field. By the end of D-Day, a good start had been made, but only a start on controlling the situation. The radiation survey had not yet been completed. Two weapons and most of the separate components had not yet been found. Communications were minimal, but situation reports to higher headquarters had started. But the needs were great, and among the urgent requests that flowed from the command staff were these. Aerial photos of the site, an aerial radiation survey, the long-range communications package called Jackpot, the Air Force's Occupational and Environmental Health Lab and the Army's Radiological Assistance Medical Team. The Army was still in command at the site since they responded first from the nearest military installation. But the Air Force, by regulation, would soon take over responsibility, since they had possession of the weapons at the time of the accident. In fact, the 22nd Air Force Disaster Response Force was now assembling at Travis Air Force Base, California, and would soon be airborne. At about midnight of D-Day, the lead party of 23 scientists and technicians from the Department of Energy's Weapons Design Laboratories arrived. They were briefed at once by General Carlson's staff, then sent off a status report to their headquarters, and finally tried to get a few hours' sleep in the desert cold. We can close out the first day of this exercise with one further comment. The three major television networks and most major newspapers carried stories on this operation right from the start. We were definitely in the public eye. The next day began with a planning meeting of unit leaders. Render safe procedures of the weapons had first priority. Early in the day, an EOD team found more of the classified weapons components near the wreckage, and reported a high radiation count near the aircraft tail. There was by now a steady influx of technical personnel. The radiation control or RADCON teams arrived from several locations throughout the United States. They were joined by Marine EOD and RADCON personnel from California and Arizona. By mid-morning, render safe procedures on the two Navy weapons were completed. A large mobile crane had been requested on D-Day, and it now came onto the site to help in weapon recovery. One of the Army's weapons was pinned under a wing and an engine. As soon as these were lifted off, EOD personnel were able to electrically save the weapon. The situation report that went out from the Army's field command post before noon placed the count at 206 military personnel now present, plus the 30 from the Department of Energy's weapons laboratories, with more to come. Communications were in danger of being swamped. But the arrival at the airstrip of the JCS jackpot mobile communications package from McDill Air Force Base in Florida promised some relief. Next to arrive was the EOD team from Hill Air Force Base, Utah, to perform render safe procedures on the two Air Force weapons. Meanwhile, the ground radiation survey pressed ahead toward a complete map of the contaminated area. But then a distraction. A crowd of noisy pickets descended on the command post. They were testing the presence of nuclear weapons. I don't let anybody move. The television news crew came along to record the fracas. And a lawyer spokesman demanded to see the commander and threatened a court injunction. The security forces were kept busy containing the more aggressive pickets. The county sheriff sent a deputy to help deal with these civilians. And in due time, they departed. It's clear that at any nuclear weapons accident, the on scene commander and his staff are under tremendous pressure from all sides. The urgent work of a large and diverse force of specialists has to be organized and prioritized. A flood of requests for special equipment, communications and logistical aid have to be met. There are demands from the press, from local officials, the next of kin, and from alarmed citizens. Higher headquarters tracks the situation continuously. All this is in the context of a situation that can be physically dangerous to all present and possibly to nearby residents. More than that, public confidence in us turns on how we conduct ourselves under stress. To put it bluntly, we're expected to know what we're doing and we'd better show that we do. Early in the afternoon of the second day, the specialists from the DOE's weapons laboratories processed across the contamination control line and joined in the work. They were a welcome addition. First for their expertise in weapons design and secondly because of their sophisticated radiation detection instruments. By mid-afternoon, shipping documents had been found in the wreckage, giving important confirmation of weapons specifics. A department of energy contractor now made the first aerial survey. Photos were taken from which a more accurate plotting could be made of weapons locations and debris. During the afternoon, field operations were momentarily suspended so that mortuary affairs personnel could remove casualties to a decontamination area. Now the Air Force's disaster response force arrived to take over from the Army. The new on-scene commander was to be Brigadier General James Gardner from Max 22nd Air Force. After he and his team had been briefed, the change of command was sealed with a friendly handshake and all forces were placed at General Gardner's disposal. At Nellis, the air transportable radiac package called ATRAP arrived from Kelley Air Force Base, Texas. Its capacity for instrument calibration and repair was urgently needed. The last of the weapons was now located. It had suffered a low-order detonation on impact. Parts of this and other weapons were also found during the afternoon. All of them contaminated, but many of the components were still missing. By late afternoon, the teams processed out for the day hot, tired, and sweaty. A nighttime staff meeting was inaugurated to brief everyone on the day's results, the problems that had surfaced, and the plans for tomorrow. While that meeting was going on, another was held, bringing together the scientists and specialists from the weapons labs on the one hand and the EOD and RADCON personnel from the services on the other. Most of them had never met before. A new little of one another's capabilities. A great deal of helpful information was exchanged, and some initial confusion about differing procedures was laid to rest. The second day closed with considerable work having been accomplished, but a lot remaining to be done. Three weapons had been found, two weapons had been saved, one was still buried, and many components still missing. A question remained as to the full extent of the area's contamination. We now had over 250 people on site. We had added a complete radiation analysis lab, a mobile decontamination facility, and the Lawrence Livermore Labs, ARAC, Atmospheric Release Advisory Capability. This would be used to predict any possible downwind contamination hazard. The Air Force's occupational and environmental health lab was here from Book's Air Force Base also. The aerial photos were being developed, and an aerial radiation survey was on for tomorrow. So ended the second day. At Nellis, more expert help arrived from the east coast. This was the Army's Radiological Assistance Medical Team from Walter Reed Hospital. They'd helped define health hazards and analyze air and water samples around the crash site. As the hotline opened on the third day, Department of Energy specialists were joining the Air Force, Navy, and Army EOD teams to continue the weapons recovery work. Meanwhile, the on-scene commander's staff was in touch with many agencies in the outside world. The local sheriff, the OSI, the state attorney general and the Air Force Inspection and Safety Center. Now began the first radiation survey from the air by a Department of Energy contractor. Within an hour, they reported finding a new hotspot southeast of the crash site at a previously unsuspected location. The ground team was sent out to define its size and boundaries, and security was expanded to include it. Soil samples were taken outside the courten and down the public road to the south. The analysis showed nothing above normal background radiation. Shortly after noon, two civilians in a dune buggy decided to try to cross the security line and pick up a few souvenirs. They didn't get very far. After they identified themselves and were checked for contamination, they were allowed to go on their way. The demands of the news media were a constant pressure on the commander and his public affairs officer. News releases were given out periodically, but the reporters always had further questions. There were queries on the possible threat to public health, property damage, the whole matter of transporting nuclear weapons safely, the specific cause of this accident, and many more. Meanwhile, the recovery work went on. A joint Navy DOE team found a heavy component of an exploded weapon in its crater, contaminated. The mobile crane was called in once more to stabilize the Air Force weapon so that the sand could be dug away. Then the render safe procedure on it was finally accomplished. As to the Army weapon, it presented some delicate problems that would be talked over far into the night. Late in the afternoon, the mother of one of the dead crew members came to the site. She wanted to claim his body for burial. She wanted to know how it happened and why, whose fault it was, and what her son had died for. It all comes down on the commander and his staff, the big crises and the small ones, the individual sorrows, the public fears. By the end of the third day, we had a pretty good radiation survey in hand. The perimeters were now defined and security was set. A request had gone out for more respirators, an airlift of seven jeeps and more heavy equipment. At the evening conference, the list of work to be done seemed almost as long as ever, but the list of accomplishments was now quite respectable. Early on the fourth day, a team of Army and DOE weapons lab people took radiographs of the damaged Army weapon. It could not be safely moved until its internal components had been stabilized. In mid-morning, the Cactus Alliance was heard from. This was a group of environmentalists who wanted everything stopped and had a state court order to enforce it. The onsite judge advocate stepped in. He advised the commander that the issuance of the restraining order was outside the state court's power. This judgment was later sustained by the state attorney general. The staff judge advocate relayed the decision by telephone to local civil authorities and operations continued. The Air Force's contamination disposal team now arrived from Kelly Air Force Base, Texas. Their work could not begin until all weapons had been recovered, but it was not too early to start planning. Now, a second aerial survey of radiation was made and an unexpected hotspot was discovered in the north part of the site. A team of Department of Energy specialists deployed there found high radiation counts and updated the plot of the area accordingly. So far, there hadn't been any wind, but we knew the dead-com conditions seldom lasted long out here. When a little breeze came up, the Army RADCON team was tasked to get background air samples. Meanwhile, Marine EOD people were keeping up the search for missing weapons parts. Other teams found most of the classified parts of the Air Force weapon and the major classified component of the Army weapon. These critical parts were brought to a special holding area and covered. With over 400 people now at the site, there seemed no end to logistical needs. Requests went out for such items as generator fuel, rubber mats, tarps, brushes, and surgical gloves. As the wind gusted up and blew sand around the mess tents, the cooks broke out cold rations for dinner. Toward the end of the fourth day, the contamination plotting was complete enough to permit the contamination control line to be moved closer to the crash site. The major problem remaining was the damaged Army weapon, but that fix would take some doing. A charter flight was set up to bring in the two tanks of nitrogen gas plus a regulator and accessories to provide the container environment needed for shipping the weapon. Not all of the exploded or buried components of other weapons had been found, but persistence hopefully would pay off. Newsmen's questions were now turning more toward possible long-term dangers. How much did we know about plant and soil contamination? How far would the wind carry it? What about evacuation of residents downwind? Why didn't we warn the public? Such stories make newspaper copy and any commander in this situation must be careful in his answers. But he must answer and as candidly as possible. Early on day five, a team set out to take soil samples outside the security perimeter to see what effect the wind had on radiation dispersal. Water samples from wells in nearby towns were also taken and all results were negative. The Air Force weapon was examined again and found to be okay to remove. More contaminated pieces were found in and around the cratered areas and the Marines found more fragments of their weapons components. In mid-morning, the mayor of a nearby town demanded to know how much longer the cleanup was going to take. Local business was suffering. He was briefed by the commander and the judge advocate advised him on claims procedures. The weapons lab team shortly afternoon made a successful fix of the troublesome army weapon using the foam cure and nitrogen gas. Then the crane moved it to a holding area. The sheriff arrived in the mid-afternoon with a new surprise, a bench warrant for the arrest of General Gardner. The charge was contempt of court for ignoring the previous restraining order. It was a hectic day for the legal officer. After consultations, he advised the sheriff that the general would not submit to the arrest warrant on the grounds that there could be no contempt of the previous order since the court had no authority to issue it. The sheriff did not press the issue. A representative from the office of the secretary of defense now arrived to get a firsthand look at how we were handling the situation. He received a very thorough briefing on every aspect of the operation. He expressed general approval and asked for an outline of the cleanup plan before leaving. The wind kicked up to 30 knots late in the afternoon, hampering operations, foul-tenting, blowing sand and cold added to the general discomfort. The cooks did manage a hot ration dinner for all that evening. After that, there was the staff meeting to review the day's activities and most especially to plan the work of identifying weapons components, decontaminating and packaging. As the fifth day ended, personnel from the DOE's Pantex Assembly Facility were established in a separate tent to coordinate this final stage of the weapons recovery effort. By the sixth day, operations were going much more smoothly throughout the camp. One big item was the completion of the telephone system, linking all units at the site. The arrival of the 1,500-gallon water tankers was a big help. They were used to wash down contaminated vehicles as well as dampen the dirt roads and parking areas for dust control and best of all, the wind subsided. The news people were still on site receiving briefings and asking questions on our progress. One man reported that a congressional investigation had been demanded in Washington. The answer to that was that any accident involving nuclear weapons would naturally be investigated in every detail. The search for weapons components was narrowing down to the few pieces still missing. Fragments of an army weapon and some marine weapons parts. In mid-morning, a television news camera helicopter overflew the crash site. The on-scene commander at once ordered the legal officer to ask for an intercept of the chopper on landing. Now the Cactus Alliance was heard from again. Still another restraining order was delivered, this time from the federal court of this district. But calls to the United States Attorney and the Judge Advocate General cleared this obstacle as well. To put to rest any lingering fears about radiation, the commander sent letters to the mayors of all nearby towns that there was not and would not be any danger to the public health from this operation. By early evening of the sixth day, the recovery plan was completed. The identification of weapons components and packaging for shipment was proceeding well. The last remaining weapons recovery task was to find the still missing pieces. In the morning of the seventh day, a joint team led by personnel from the Los Alamos Scientific Lab made a sweep of the area north of the wreckage with radiation detection meters and found four of six missing parts. The other two were found and all EOD teams could finally say mission accomplished. And so this first of a kind exercise of our national response capability came to an end. The events that took place were staged and accelerated to compress what would take weeks or even months to do into a brief seven day period. After all the critiques were in, we saw that there is a continuing need for us to review and improve our response capabilities for nuclear weapons accidents.


The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating effect on the United States, with over 1 million people dying between February 2020 and May 2022. This has resulted in a significant reduction in life expectancy and economic welfare losses. In particular, the non-Hispanic white population has been hit hardest, with a loss of US$6.50 billion in income growth and US$0.24 billion in the value of lives lost. The Hispanic population has also suffered greatly, with a loss of US$8.24 billion in income growth and US$9.93 billion in the value of lives lost. These figures highlight the urgent need for investment in healthcare to protect against future pandemics. This article was authored by Sachin Silva, Eric Goosby, and Michael J. A. Reed.


Welkom back, this is still why in the morning and to me fika that segment where we're talking about ladies and what ladies can do and what they can't do. So the question to Mekulisa on our show media handles ni, si madempia wa pate uhuru wa kuchagua na kupropoze, ama mnuna naji. So you're telling us if ladies can also propose the hashtag to use the WCW at Y254 channel across all social media handles, my personal handle is at Stephanie and I've joined by two lovely ladies. Please start introducing for my immediate right. Okay, Y254 in the morning, my name is Daisy Wanjiko, for my women representative KCA University, but currently I'm a finance manager at Axtile Limited. Amazing, and Avial, your name is quite interesting. Good morning, my name is Avian Ryak, I'm a journalism student at the University of Nairobi. I also model part-time here, that's all basically.  Okay, Satwa, we start this conversation. What do you think about ladies proposing? Okay, according to me personally, I think it's not right. Many people are saying that the world is changing, many things are changing, so we have to adapt to them. But according to me, I don't feel like it's appropriate for a lady to propose to a man. Yeah, personally, I can't do this. Why? Why? Why is it not appropriate? Umadiko, is it set in stone mahali? Why?  But maybe when you go to propose to him, maybe he was not prepared, maybe it's like you're forcing and the respect that he will have for you won't be the same as compared to when he came to propose to you, see. But I'm thinking before we go to Daisy, the dynamics, is it not the same because a man when he proposes to you, maybe you're not ready? Is it not the same thing that might happen? You're proposing to a man, maybe he's not ready, maybe he is. It happens, maybe a man can propose to a lady and the lady is not ready. You see, yes, someone has the liberty to say no. But you know the moment you go to propose to a man, like me, for example, I go to propose to a man, then he tells me no. You think I'll ever do that again, you see. I don't think this is the proof. I can't. Okay, he tells Daisy, would you propose to a man? Is it okay for a lady to propose to a man? Well, personally, I think it depends on the time and duration when you're supposed to propose because you can't date a man for like five years and that man maybe has never proposed to you. So you should pop the question up. Yes, it's a question time. So you can't date a man, you can't propose to a woman. So to me, I don't find it as a big deal per se because I find it also someone who is sober with the relationship if you've dated for a very long time. I think you should pop that question because at times you may find your partner delaying and stuff. So you can just ask. So now, the reason why she wouldn't propose is if she gets rejected by a man, she will propose and then she will say I'm not really. She will say no, it's not you. So what would happen? Okay, to me rejection is not something that you should take in a negative way because in life you'll face the rejection part of it. So it's how you perceive life. I don't find rejection is a negative thing because maybe in the first place he was not supposed to be the one. So how you take it, it's the issue there. So the sooner you ask, the better you get to move on with life. Okay, I'm loving this. Let's see what guys on social media are saying. So the hashtag to use is WCW on Y254 channel and this is what people on Facebook are saying. Filius Kennedy, innaweza. MC Grand, onamia na sama. Admin na kwa na batiko, fine, happy Madarakade. Thanks for tuning in. Elianto Kee, na sama, sounds like a plan. Happy Madarakade to all fans. And these are all guys speaking. So guys, we are going to start now. Ladies proposing. Elvinso, Provinso has some more sounds. Ya, inka yuko shuwa bado. Keep the comments coming in. The hashtag is WCW. So now, back to you, Avin. So mibudu ni kwa kwa historia. Aki kata, aki kukata, aki kwa reject. But is it not the same? Because ladies also rejects men wakiku proposia. Is it not the same effect? Manoma na huwa nga naio. Nya wu ta kwa naio kirijectiwa? Okay, my colleague has said something very interesting that rejection is part of life.  You won't continue like that. When he will propose, he rejects you. But sometimes men waste people's time. Somebody can date you for a very long time and he won't do anything. But it's not upon you. When you see somebody is wasting your time and he won't propose any time soon, it's better for you wu jitoi than you wait for him. You wait for him, maybe he'll propose and maybe he won't. As compared to you go there, you start telling him you marry me. It doesn't seem right even. It doesn't seem right. Men are seen to be traditionally the hunters. They were meant for this work. And I went and put it. I built for it. You get it from me as a lady. So men are built to be hunters naturally. What do you think of this? Okay. Hunters in terms of... The ones pursuing a lady. The ones who are supposed to make that step. Okay. From where we are right now, I believe women empowerment has done a lot in the country. So that purposely has really done a lot of work, especially for women. So boy child, if you look at most of the men right now you can find so many women are very aggressive. So by the time this man is supposed to even propose to this woman, you can imagine the persuasion, the class, I don't know what. So if you see the women they are pursuing and all staff, but for now... Things have changed. But someone might argue, if a lady proposes, probably she is desperate. This lady doesn't propose. She says, I am a woman. I am at that age because people have a perception that ladies but if you are at that age, if you are 13 and you have a boyfriend, there is no sign of you getting married or getting proposed to anytime soon, then that becomes a problem. So when you propose to a man that you are too desperate for me and I feel like maybe let me delay. If we might look for someone else, then we might consider it bad. What do you think about this? Are ladies too desperate when they propose? I don't think a woman can be desperate by just proposing because even in our life atokit after a job, siwomunyondu una uza sirayako. So you should not look it as atiju moname ani moname endana fa propose. As I've said earlier, rejection is part of life and the way the world is changing right now, there is nothing like ati sijuwi ati ya woman should not propose and all that. Another thing, if you concentrate and work on your own self by the time you are at that age, wana umo ata kwa tuwa nakuja ata wemonye uta kuona notice actually you will be done who will be picking them up. So by the time they are rejecting you, we are going to reject this another one on the line. So it's not a matter of them rejecting you, it's a matter of who you are as a person and how you find rejection is part of your life. Okay, but on the line theme rejection is part of life, you move on. You move on. What do you think about this? Are women desperate when they propose now that you are against women proposing? I am very against it, you know. So are they desperate when a woman proposes, you think they are desperate? According to me, I'll give an example. So there's a lady I know so you see most ladies right now due to women empowerment rights. So a lady in her twenties she will try to be financially stable when men come her way she rejects them because she has a goal, you see.  So the time she finds someone, someone who's willing to be with her she will pressurize him into marriage and such things, forcing her to propose to the man maybe the man is not decided yet, you see. Yes, I believe that some ladies it is a point they become desperate because nobody wants to reach 40s and he's not married, you see for some ladies because some ladies even don't want to get married but I feel like you shouldn't propose because I do. I'm still against this. You know some people might say it's being traditional, it's being backward. So from what you're saying is that as much as there's women empowerment and want to be dukated and everything we should allow men to be part of that journey so that's to say 30 and then to quote that after we are desperate now looking for men. Okay, so sorry. We take that down. I am back to you Daisy. It's okay to propose, you can propose to a man. Now how do you go about let's start with proposing now just into a relationship before we get into marriage. Can ladies now cut here any kujakamia by the way and I could like and this is different. You also tell us if that is okay. So can you, as opposed to by the way I've been crashing on you so much can we try this out? Can I take you out for coffee? Is that okay? We run for kukatia, now that one is different. It's totally different because proposing I think it's somehow different from kukatia now. Because also in the Bible let me quote even if the Bible mendi kwa men should love women should submit so your work kazi akwa umeni kati asawa you're submitting to the love. So atia yoku kunini kukatia enewe to me I don't find it right. But to propose you can. But it's not a type of proposing I guess it's just that in the early stages you're initiating it but the same when you're still initiating marriage now you're initiating a relationship. Is it not the same thing? I don't find it the same thing. So it's different. It's somehow different, totally different. And what is your thought on this? Umeka tia marriage apana but kuna uchali ame kumali za I've been crashing on you. Okay here I beg to differ with this because you know marriage is complex as compared to like a relationship.  I love how you chant it.  Have you ever tried it? No No but you're open to that? I'm open to that but as for me personally I can do it just that I just that I'm approachable. But is it not the same thing that you're posing to because how will they see you again? What if he rejects you because he or Mario Khmat they might reject you if you approach them and then he rejects you you approach another he rejects is it not the same for you? Okay it's not the same as compared to marriage because you see when like you're going to propose in marriage right that one like you're going straight forward to the point you know right now ladies can use different tactics it's not that you go to him and like I've seen you I want us to date no we're not too like I don't have any alternative You know maybe some ladies are suffering and they crush you so what are some of them? You know I feel like you should not go like directly to the point that just create a friendship create a bond if things are meant to work out they will work out they were not meant to work out so long shoot your short answer But your friendship is different you can be friends for 5 years but I think we can work we can work this out as a couple so how do I tell you we can date how do I approach it not directly there are many signals like you see for example you send someone a song there's that kind of message you see as compared to me you know like going to someone and they tell him can we date you see it's hard not every lady can do that but I don't think it's bad I totally agree with that but for marriage okay what do you do if I know you're not for it but what are some of the ways for the ladies that are for it that they can approach a man in an indirect way to tell them let's try let's try dating this is not in marriages how do you do I'm so ma song however you do I think my actions my actions will tell that I want this guy how when a lady is a complicated so at a figure they take long to now that's maybe what I can do maybe I can take him for a date so will you ask him but should they ask him no I'm putting myself in her shoes maybe I can take him on a date and maybe I can ask him 1,2,3 and then I can take him on a date and then I can take him on a date okay okay and now to proposing for marriage this one you are for how would you propose to a man because to najwa the normal way for men to propose to a lady they go down on one knee they pop a question how would you go about proposing to a man now that one that one for kneeling that one can be a little bit hard for me for proposing now you know proposing is large so you can also yourself kama dem when you are in that relationship you can try like you can try like you can try like you can try like you can try like you can try like you can kneel down on his knees his own will be doing it so that's basically pushing him in the right direction that's not coming straight to propose to him but would you propose to him directly any one umstu at will a surprise the way atakwa mbi atina kupaga kwa propose next month he'll organize with your friends surprise you take you somewhere maybe you know there are different ways a romantic ways would you go for the romantic one for kneeling maybe I can try you know love can be funny maybe I can try you can try going down on one knee I know you know for this but put yourself in her shoes how would you how would a lady propose to a man you know as she was talking I mean imagining her kneeling proposing to a man I I'm a picture high kujii atwa I kujii atwa I don't know because kwa leg nimi sayi digifiki tia ni me kneel sijin mi kujii sijin ni flowers it's very strange and for the ring mi na joani ladies when I came so how would you the man will you also put the ring on a man you can kneel down then I'm away maybe a surprise engagement unatafta crew they are there eating your dinner then you kneel we are carrying and you propose and you put the ring on simple okay alright let us take a look let us take a look what some people are saying on social media before we continue Y254 channel is the social media handle hachati mne so most guys are for ladies proposing gen wajremu lakia na sama please stop encouraging laziness among men ya ni kwa ken ya ni laziness supposed to do this work uh slai umaji anasa mani me kuchanguwa admin we are na kuja kupropoziya admin so uh huh vacant soul available okay wengino ana gitu amiji avade door kasmash watching life from fika so basically what I'm seeing is that men are for this they are very open but the ladies are not for it but some ladies are not for it you are representing some she is representing others but na wu nauna na je is it encouraging laziness among men of course because sir in a relationship I feel like demand wana fakuji as compared to the lady when you do everything you want to propose you want to buy flowers you want to buy the ring it's desperation at some point and pure like the man will feel ah if she's doing all these things she can as well propose to me to show you like I love you or the one I want to be with you say so I agree with the person who say that it promotes a lot of laziness among men okay so now let me ask you the question now that you are open to oh no it's actually Daisy who's open kwa you know not approaching a man so in a relationship of the man she will approach you to start dating but now playing hard to get maybe you want this man like ini you're playing hard to get is it a good method that ladies use ama wuna faku submit to automatically now you are talking about submission wuna faku submit to automatically wuna taka wuna mtaka yes but pure ladies wuna faku play hard to get but pure uta hi kuji pata kwa yop position in yotaru this is how we went when zeku playing hard to get it can work well kwa zisa sa lasimam tuwa struggle yaw yop pinch yaku pata uta wuna but the moment aki pata hi kitu rahisi I find wotali ata hi ku respect so it will be more more of you trying to play hard to get playing the 30 days rule oh street no play hard to get and to you what do you think about that okay playing hard to get is okay but don't overdo it because the moment you overdo it maybe you're interested but you want to do it we have to play hard to get so that the man can respect us so you will try to play hard to get but maybe you're not interested in such things he'll move on to someone else so in as much as you play hard to get don't overdo it wuna if you want add him to wana you don't want anything to do with him okay we're getting lindis wana first at this point have you ever been in a point where you're just being friendly naturally you're a friendly person the sign kakwa misread and then you had to turn that down and then now the opposites you're interested in someone but you can't tell it and you know you know something of that sort okay you know some people they usually misinterpret these people who are naturally friendly with everyone so the moment you know would you ever hug everybody like that and say oh maybe I'll cut you indirectly and maybe that's not the case now what do you think about this Tezi maybe it's one of the signals you're putting out but you're just being friendly okay me my personality I'm a very free spirit person and I hang out okay I hang out with a lot of people so I've been in that point many times but again it's how you switch it off then maybe you know maybe I'm reading the wrong way now you divert it somewhere else but won't you be avoiding him to try to change yeah of course like many times especially if you are naturally as a friend when you are in a relationship you are in a relationship you can say ladies are complicated you can't tell signs are there signs that ladies give out as we come to a close in this conversation are there signs that ladies are an opportunity and then you know this one is interested not to say they are the men out here yeah let me tell you one thing a man can never approach a woman because they fear rejection so any time I see a man trying to try out a woman can never be ready because they know who you are I know how many signs do you have? how much? I don't know it's just common sense there are things you can maybe try and entertain this kind is like maybe chatting around 9 almost talking lovely things these are whole lot of signs so you want to say anything on signs before we come to a close signs also when you are texting someone the emojis you are using because there are certain emojis they can't be misinterpreted they have meaning I don't know how to explain them but most of them show the same thing when you send it to someone it has that particular meaning so emojis about pens you want to the text ladies play a lot the hair you say so your last word as we come to a close in the social media handles okay what I can say I think I'll be diverting man I'm speaking to the man in particular if you're not willing to settle down with a lady like you've been with her wasting her time 10 years some people even date you for 10 years it's better to be honest with the person I don't see this thing working out then wasting somebody's time 5 to 10 years up you're not willing to marry them you just want to date them so that when you reach a certain point you go to another woman so it's better to be honest to someone if you reach a point you don't want them any more be honest to them than wasting their time for social media I'm not so active I mostly use WhatsApp it is okay thank you very much Daisy it's to women first of all know your worth know who you are as a person by the time this proposing things comes if you are around 30 years I don't know the age gap you have as a person but by the time you reach age you will grow and you will know what kind of a man you want so by that time even if you propose you already know what kind of a man you want to men was your gope was your gope because that woman is empowered now you cannot propose to that woman for me you can follow me at TaxStyleLimited for Twitter Tax underscore and for Instagram TaxStyle and join us to do Xera and Interior house moldings amazing thank you very much ladies for sharing your insights on this particular topic those have been insights for the perspective of ladies what they think about ladies proposing to men tell us what you think about this at Y254 channel the hashtag to use is WCW my name is Stephanie Ayata we are taking a short break and then we come back with Rob to close this


Greetings, greetings. This is James P. Madonna of Megalife21. I'm in the Dollar Tree right now, the local Dollar Tree. I just noticed some things that are very amusing. Here is the Dollar Store drug test. Marijuana drug test? Marijuana is medicinal. I don't consider marijuana to be bad. It kills, destroys cancer. It's great for a whole host of ailments. Of course, one of the planet Earth's most medicinal plants. But anyway, drug test. You know what?  This is funny though. Dollar Store home pregnancy test. I guess it's very trust-worthy for a buck, right? Ovulation predictor. Only a dollar. Then over here, we have adult lubricant. I guess otherwise known as sexual lubricant for a dollar each. Gotta love it. Gotta love these dollar stores, right? Let's see what else. Oh, by the way, the hair coloring that I tried here doesn't work. And they got all kinds of feminine napkins, feminine pads, maxi pads. There's tampons and, you know, different different things. I just thought it was a bit amusing. Let's see if anything else here is amusing. But you can get, believe it or not, you can get Zyrtec here, which is amazing. Let me see. Oh, that's Benadryl. That'll knock you right out. Here's Loretidin, all right, which is Claretin. But I'm okay. Oh, here we go. Allergy pills. The generic version of Zyrtec for a dollar. I mean, considering how much it costs normally. You get 10 soft gels. But still, for a buck, Zyrtec. Nondrausey allergy formula here at the Dollar Tree. And all the other lovelies are available. Eyedrops, so on and so forth. Pain killers. Okay, ear plugs, depending on who's nagging you at home or how loud your landscapers are.