Welcome to this special edition of the Forecast from Cambridge
University. I'm very happy to say that my
guest is Doctor James or he's the associate professor of the
philosophy of religion at the university and a very close
friend of the Vice President, JD Vance.
And that's one of the reasons why he's happy to talk to us
today. James, good to have you on the.
Program good to be with you. JD Vance, right, your mate, he
said. He's on the record for saying in
2016, Trump is irresponsible. You know, he's he's not up to
the job of being president. And then, of course, that famous
comparison, which he's been asked about, you know, ad
nauseam, Trump, you know, could become America's Hitler.
Explain your friend's journey from these really searing
criticisms of the man who's now his boss to basically, you know,
agreeing with everything the boss says today.
What's happened in 2016? What's his journey?
In 2016, I think you would have struggled to find anyone in
American public life who would have said Trump running for
president. Great.
He seems so. He seems so responsible.
He is what America needs. He's rational.
He's predictable. He's got brilliant policy ideas.
Nobody was saying that. But not everyone was saying he
was Adolf Hitler in the making. Listen, I mean, that's that's.
Quite an accusation I haven't seen.
I haven't seen any evidence that he said he is out of.
No, no, he said that, he said on the.
On this point of view, he saw him as a strong man, and I think
what? He knows he could become
America's and. Everybody's calling Hitler
nowadays. Everybody's Hitler.
This is not a term that this is a term that is sadly being
cheapened by its by overuse, I think.
Look, let me just let me just finish what is striking about
Vance's journey. First of all, it's a journey.
Many vast swathes of the GOP class are still where Vance was
in 2016. Vance is a very good
exemplification of the principle that the willingness to change
one's mind is the. Only sure sign is the only sure.
Sign. That one's got one right.
It's good old Keynes. When the facts change, my mind
changes. What do you do?
Sometimes you say it's hypocrisy or it's 2.
Transactions. What's about ambition?
He. Says I think he could be this.
Trump comes along, does the opposite, does things that JD
had been calling for implicitly hillbilly energy all the way
through in terms of economics, economic populism, in terms of
energy sovereignty, deregulation, border control.
But even in 2020, at the end of the Trump administration, even
in 2020, JD Vance is in the on the record.
I think it's something. I think it's a mark of Trump's
magnanimity that not only did he forgive Vance, calling him
America's, possibly America's next Hitler, he made him his own
vice president, some autocrat, you know, some some narcissist.
Yeah. And so, yes, he's been on a
journey. I think if you look at the
strength of support he's shown from 2020 on one onwards, when
he was running a very difficult Ohio campaign, it's very hard
for us now to remember back in 2122.
Trump is in. He's been written off by the.
And actually, JD Vance's victory in that Senate, he was one of
the few. The only the only the red way
that there was that was his tiny little bit of a.
Red one. It was a red trickle a.
Red or red trickle. And it was Vance.
And from there on in, from on the Senate floor at enormous
political cost, very iced to take up very isolated views,
isolations, isolated views, realist views on Ukraine and a
whole range of other issues. It was a difficult thing to do.
And he didn't waiver. Trump and Team Trump saw that.
And that's why they thought that Donald needs a doe fur.
He's our doe fur. And also, I guess JD Vance
realised in this one example that if you attach yourself to
Donald Trump and he attaches himself to you in some areas,
that could be a winning ticket, right?
You know, had he, had he not won that seat, I wonder what he
would. Have in the summer of 2022, it
seemed. In fact, I remember how
concerned I was at the time. Is this really a good idea?
I know you see yourself as being ideologically aligned with
Trump, but look, he's got 95 legal cases against, so the
guy's going to be in jail, not the Oval Office.
What on earth are you doing? And yet he stuck with him
through thick and thin. Do you see JD Vance as the
future President of the United States?
Yes, I do. You do you think he'll be
elected in the next election? Well.
I think he will be the Republican candidate in 2027 and
I think he stands a very, very looking at approval ratings for
the Democrat Party, which are lower than they've been in
living memory. I suspect.
Look, not going to make predictions.
This is a very, very time of unprecedented flux in American
politics. Of course, my sense is he is
dead set to be Republican candidate for the next
presidential election. And I think he on, you know, my,
my sense is he's got a very good chance of being in the Oval.
Office does he see that's that way I mean has he told you that
he that's. That's what he's.
He doesn't think about it at all, I think.
No, I think he. Why don't I believe that?
Because he's very conscious of people like you asking questions
about it. And he is absolute.
If you took in every public pronouncement, including the
actually and as well as private pronouncements, as we saw from
the Signal a few weeks ago, he was very clear about what is it
the what is the president's mind on this?
What is the president's view? And my sense is he's got his
loyalty to Trump is, is absolute. 2028 for him is a long
way off. And I suspect that he he within,
within MAGA, he is being acclaimed as the Doefur, as the
most obvious successor to Trump. And indeed, that's why I think
Team Trump pushed so hard for him when it would have been
easier to appoint a more, you know, electorally attractive
running mate. I mean, Trump himself was out
polling Vance in Ohio in 2022. It didn't make any electoral
sense. It it I think what Team Trump
recognised that was, you know, Vance was the future of MAGA.
That if we want Trumpism to persist beyond Trump, then he's
our man. So what is how does that tally
with one plan that's been muted that, you know, President Trump
talks about this quite openly. I might, might run for a third
term, maybe not. That would, you know, either
require a change of the Constitution, which is tough, or
there's this ruse that Vance becomes the the main candidate,
Donald Trump runs as the vice and they do a Switcher route.
This is what Putin did with Medvedev.
But do you think that your friend would agree with that?
Like he he wins the presidency and then says, OK, Donald, off
you take, you know, off you go for another term.
I find that hard to imagine. I I.
I think he would keep his counsel.
I think he I think if, if he were pressed, if the Constitute,
if he were asked, if the Constitution permitted it, would
you want Trump to run for a third term?
I think he'd say yes. If but the Constitution.
Doesn't, but the Constitution doesn't.
So I think look. But even you are putting a
little question mark over that. What?
No. What do you mean?
Do I think that they're actually going to, he's going to, he's
going to run for it? No, I think that's completely
fanciful. Look, as always with Trump, look
at what he says. Look at what he does, not what
he says. And as I keep saying to you,
you've got to do both right? Because he says a lot of stuff.
You've got to weigh them correctly and I think too many
in the media classes, particularly in the UK, tend to
focus too much on what he says and not enough.
On that's because he wants us to focus on it, right?
It's about the attention of the economy.
I want to talk about, you know, morality and tariffs.
Is it moral for the United States to impose a tariff of
what is it 45% on the Soto, you know, a country that's simply
too poor to buy American goods? Is it?
Is that Christian? Is that Christian behaviour?
Let's. Just take a step back on the
whole kind of tariffs question. It it is not, it's very easy to
single out. Not just I'm glad you're saying
that as a as a as an associate professor of the the philosophy
of religion, we. Can come on to that, but then we
can take. We want to take take a
philosophical view of tariffs. We, we, we, we could take, we
could take a look at Lesotho or we could take a look at that
rock in the middle of nowhere with just Penguins on it.
Yes, right now. So, so what's going on here, as
I understand it from trade specialists and certainly not a
trade specialist. If you're trying to signal to
the world that you are interested, you you are
passionate about reducing tariffs and getting to the point
of a fairer trade and freer trade, then you can't allow any
loopholes, right? You can't allow, you know, China
to so funnel it's good through that's who to and so the
questions you. Know one of the Chinese were
using the sushi. I think that, well, that one
just got caught up in the geographical drag.
Absolutely right. And I think the question is but.
That's the problem, isn't it? You know, this is a hammer for a
nail. Do you want to use, you know,
something slightly more precise? Look, from the Americans point
of view, this is not a nail. This is actually a deep
structural problem in the post war international order.
Coming from the country that is by far the richest on the
planet, that's not exactly done, you know, bad out of the system.
It's done very bad. That has done very, very well,
but has also catalysing the prosperity of major emerging
civilisational actors who are plainly hostile to not just
American interests, but the interests of all of us across
the West. And I think that's certainly,
certainly. Through About China.
And talk and talk is absolutely about China.
And no one disagrees with the fact that China been very
naughty when it comes to trade. And so the.
Sealing property rights says. Not, you know, how dare.
Is it fair? Is it moral?
Is it? But that is the question.
Well, no, because hold on. Because well, then forget about
Christian, there's there's fairness in trade, whether
you're a Jew or a Muslim as well, right?
So right. But is it fair?
Is it and is it necessary? And is it?
If you're a. Art James or.
If you're a Christian politician, if you're any
politician, to whom do you owe your first obligations and
loyalties? To the people whom you
represent. And from the American's point of
view, the people that they represent have been marginalised
and dispossessed. And but which people?
Because when you're talking about the small businessman they
know that imports Barbie dolls from China to sell in the well,
let me just finish to sell in the toy shop down the road,
small family business, they're going bust.
You're talking about the auto workers who we had in the Rose
Garden. They might not get the jobs that
they've been promised as a result of all this.
You're talking about your mates on Wall Street.
Well, they're really upset because they've just lost a.
Ton of money. The Trump Pants administration
are desperate to see a quick, concrete solution to what they
see as an unfair trading environment.
And the question is really a tactical one.
Do should they spend the next four years carefully negotiating
bilateral trade agreements with the Lesotho and other, you know,
other countries around the world?
Don't bother with. The well, their view is this is
not a nail. This is this, this is a serious
problem that needs a bazooka. We've got to RIP the bandage
off. What you're seeing is an
attempt, an extremely, you know, an attempt to deal with an
extremely complex problem. Roosevelt tried it in the 1940s.
Reagan tried it in the 1980s to with with some success.
He's attempting to reconfigure the entire global international
order with respect to trade. And he sees in China credibly
and plausibly A hostile civilisational actor that has
done extremely well out of the United States, that is
artificially manipulating its currency downwards to make its
exports more attractive, that has been ripping off the
American intellectual property for many, many, many years, and
that has been imposing consistently higher tariffs than
America's been imposing on it. Same with the European Union
with respect to tariffs. One thing that really strikes
me, especially about him, your friend JD Vance is, and you
know, he's smart. He's written a great book.
The Hillbilly Energy is a is a superb book.
He is smart, but he's also angry.
And that anger comes across whether he's dealing with
Zelensky in the Oval Office, whether he's addressing
Europeans at the Munich Security Summit.
Where's that anger from? I don't need to tell you, Matt,
as a reporter, A seasoned reporter on the United.
And that's for the flat. Over years, over many, many
years, that anger is one that you can see it in Hillbilly
Elegy. You see it in the book.
You see it in that sense of pride that he has in middle
America, but also horror at what he perceives, I think quite
plausibly, as the economic devastation of the American
working class. But I'm talking about civility,
or rather the lack of civility in something like dealing with,
you know, President Zelensky in the Oval Office.
I mean, that was appalling, wasn't it, the way he, you know,
behaved towards someone. And I know, you know, JD Vance
knows about the military because he served at the military.
But here's someone who's basically prepared to give his
life for his country who didn't run.
The Americans offered him a ride.
He didn't take it. And he's, you know, defended his
nation from Russian aggression. And here's JD Vance basically,
you know, assaulting him in the Oval Office.
Verbally, I will simply say that in the six or seven years I've
known him, I've never known him lose his temper once.
He's personally very equitable. But he did then.
And and in that it well, look, we all lose our temper.
Very easy to lose once, but. Onto the cameras at the Oval
Office. Well, I think it was unwise.
Choose your moments. Look, I think it was, you're
probably right that it was unwise for a proper and
important trilateral conversation or bilateral
conversation between the Ukraine, but between Zelensky
and and Trump Vance to be conducted in the Oval Office.
Now I in front of the cameras and I think the kinds of
conversation, the sort of conversation you had there is
the kind of conversation that is happening behind closed doors.
Was it a setup though? No, absolutely not you.
Sure about that. I had no question of the setup.
If you look at the whole, the whole thing from start to
finish, it was actually very amicable conversation right up
to the last two or three minutes.
And you could see throughout the conversation that Zelensky was
pushing, as you would expect him to.
He's pushing for his countries. He is a national conservative
too. He's pushing for his nation's
interests. Nothing wrong with that.
But he went into the conversation, I think he was
badly briefed. He was badly advised because
what? Did and he didn't have a
translator which would have helped him.
All sorts of that, all sorts of things he could.
Even so, Even so, the, the fact that he's in, he's, he's their
guest, he's in their office, he's in the Oval Office and
they're rounding on him. Listen, that is just
unacceptable, isn't it? I mean, even whether you agree
with the Ukraine policy or not, look.
He's not just just in the Oval Office, He is in the cockpit of
a nation that is, whose generosity and support is, but
he's held his own nation. But he.
Wasn't being. Rude.
Well, look, he really wasn't. And he has said thank you, you
know, for America's help aplenty almost every day.
Look. Look look, I don't you can very
easy to pick up on personal foibles or momentary lapse.
This was a key moment there, wasn't it?
And your old friend didn't come out of it in the minds of, you
know, many people around the world looking any better for it.
Was it was a key moment. It was a key moment.
What would you tell Vance down the phone if he rang you up and
asked you about that? Would you say, JD, you went too
far or would you say fantastic? No, I in fact, no, I certainly
wouldn't. It was not not my place to tell
him how to conduct him. A friend of his.
It's, I'm a friend of his, but, and it, it is, it is the duty of
friends to be critical where necessary.
He's also the vice president of the United States.
And I think in that particular context, and we've been talking
about, he and I've been talking about Ukraine for the best part
of two or three years, and he has been mystified at the lack
of a serious debate in the public square all across Europe,
including the UK. And about what there has been
plenty of debate about. I think for.
Ukraine from how we're helping. No, look, I'm glad to say
there's been the support for Ukraine and the admiration of
Zelensky has been, broadly speaking, pretty, pretty.
Unanimous. And you're in favour of that?
I'm absolutely in favour of that and I think he's in favour too.
What he is in favour of is a peaceful and prosperous Ukraine
and he is looking in a very clear eyed way.
How do we get Ukraine on the path to reconstruction?
How do we stop 2000 Ukrainians being centered in the meat
grinder every week? How can we reverse?
Which is all very, which is fantastic, you see.
How to get there when you've been a president who is bent on
accelerating the war and who is? Still who you're talking about.
I'm talking about Zelensky. When you've got somebody who.
Is trying to accelerate the war. He's trying to win the war.
He's trying to precisely. The war that he doesn't start.
There's a difference. And nobody and nobody.
Will hang on a minute, what do you actually mean?
So what I'm trying to say here is that every clear eyed
military analysis of the situation in Ukraine recognises
that there is no way that Ukraine can defeat Russia, No
way at all. But the other question is how
does Ukraine get or what's left of Ukraine tragically, how, how
do we, how does America exercise it's leverage with Russia as
well to get what's, what can survive from, from, from Ukraine
back on the path to peace, prosperity and reconstruction?
My sense is the perception the White House in on January the
20th on inauguration day was that if you're going to get
peace talks going between Russia and Ukraine, you're there's
going to have to be some kind of optical, optical rebalancing.
That is to say the demonizing of Putin.
Quite right. He, he, Putin is mad.
It is bad, but he's not mad. You've got to start to
understand him as a rational, though malevolent actor.
On the other hand, I think the view is that Zelensky has been
unhelpfully for him and unhelpfully for his nation,
cause lionized, indeed. Canonized front page of Vogue.
Yeah, there's been a lot. Of But like Donald Trump, he's
been on the front page of of of Time magazine.
Pretty Man of the year twice. Pretty stalionisation.
Pretty yes, that colonisation look.
Whatever. Look, I wonder how many spreads
we like. Obama But we like, you know, we
especially Britain, we like the underdog, absolutely.
And we like someone who resists aggression.
You're right and I think. And you're taking that away
from? Him one of the problems I think
we have in Britain, and partly it's a, you know, it's a feature
of our history, is that we suffer from bad cases of World
War Two brain. That is to say, every serious
geopolitical crisis on the continent, it seems can only be
refracted through a conflict that ended 80 years ago, which
we happen to do very well in. And so Vance's Chamberlain,
Zelensky is Churchill, Putin is Hitler, Ukraine is Poland.
And I just think that's an incredibly unhelpful way to
understand rational action by these nation States and very
different personalities, very different dynamics.
To be fair to him, on Trump's watch, there were very, very few
major, or if not, if any major conflicts.
Putin did not, would not, I think very if, if Trump had had
won in 2020, it hadn't been Biden.
I very much doubt that we'd have seen that that that.
Invasion the madman is right. So this guy is powerful.
He's unpredictable. Look.
I wonder if that that theory still stands there after the,
you know, the way that Trump is basically.
Look, do we think that Trump. Mollified do we think?
That Trump is just is predictable on anything,
including the question of a rival strongman undermining his
stated goals of achieving peace and prosperity in the Ukraine.
No I don't. I think the madman theory has
it's has it's merits. Your mate JD Vance, you know
he's smart. He may well be the next
president. I don't know.
But he's also quite mean, isn't he?
I mean, the stuff he said in Green and about the Danes was
just mean. It was, it was in politic, it
was uncivil. This, you know, the stuff that
he said to, you know, the Europeans at Munich, that's
mean. The way he treated the way he
treated Zelensky and the other was.
You mean you've been can? You talk to him and say stop
being so mean. You've been covering politics.
You're not mean. It's politics is.
I'm not a politician. I don't have to be mean.
I'm not representing the interests of millions of people.
I'm not standing. Representing my country, you
cannot be politics to pick fights with your friends and
allies. The question is to what extent
have they been good friends and allies?
And I think the remarks in Greenland were, look, has
Denmark, has Denmark really been doing everything that it can to
take seriously? The Greenlanders, all 57,000 of
them, who, by the way, don't want to become America's 51st
state in Canada in case. Canada and Vance was very clear
that that is a matter for the Greenlanders.
He was very clear in that, in that, in that, in those
pronouncements of the press conference.
So he's not, you know, it's but this, this question of niceness,
is he going to cuddle? Is he why isn't he more cuddly?
I'll talk about, let me assure you.
Nice is the wrong word. Civility, right?
So this is so, you know, just to get to the number of it.
America, you know, of course it's not been plain sailing.
And I know Americans feel that, you know, they've been
victimized by others and they've been taken for a ride.
And it's not Uncle Sam, it's Uncle Sucker, all that stuff.
But America has prevailed for 80 years, not just because of its
hard power, but because of its soft power.
The fact that it's got a message that people want to buy into,
right? Isn't it throwing all that away
with the way it's behaving right now?
I think actually you've seen certainly in this country a
rising tide of anti Americanism, of hostility towards America and
American culture and I think soft power and look, I know the
Foreign Office loves to talk about.
I think it's overrated. Tell that to the Hooties, you
know, I mean, have they not heard?
We're not talking about. The Hooties.
And we're not talking about Hamas.
We're talking about the Germans, the French, the Brits, the
Belgians. You're putting your
fingestyneans, you're putting your finger on something very
important. And I think this is a challenge
for every nation that becomes an empire, whether it wants to be
or not, whether it calls itself an empire or not.
The fact is there are two Americas.
There's the nation, and there's the global hegemon.
There's in, in Vance's words, there's we the people.
And America is a proposition in which anybody can sign up.
Yeah, but. America won the America won the
war against the Soviet Union without firing a single shot
right? Because it outspent them on
defence? Absolutely.
And because America had a message, call it soft power,
call it what you like, had a message that the rest of the
planet was more beguiled by than the Soviet.
And what was that message? That message was freedom over
tyranny. Yeah.
And part of the part of wait, wait, let me hold on, Let me
finish. Part of the power of that Munich
speech that Vance gave was that you Europeans, who we Americans
look to, who we see as the cradle of the freedoms that we
love, are failing to give expression to the stated will of
your people. To be free to enjoy free speech.
To be able to pray outside an abortion clinic without being
arrested. Nonsense.
He's trying. You know, this is the
administration that's interfering in the German
elections. Elon Musk appearing at Afd
rallies. Don't talk to me about
interference. Listen, Jamie.
Vance has dinner with the head of the Afd in the.
And why does he do that? And.
Why does he do that? But he doesn't talk to the
German, no. Why does it?
Why and why? Why?
Yeah, why you tell me so? So let well, I'll tell you
exactly why. There is a sense first of all,
that the previous administration, in fact
administration all the way up, but particularly Biden
administration had been using American power to press and to
astroturf organizations, to fund organizations that are plainly
contested and ideological in countries all around the world,
particularly in Eastern Europe, with particularly more
conservative countries like Hungary and Poland.
And the US administration said their view is, look, if you care
about freedom, if you if you share our founding vision of
what makes Europe great and what makes America get great,
freedom, individual responsibility, faith, family
and so on. And all the things that we
fought against the Soviet Union for, all the things that
energize, energized us from Second World War all the way up
to 1989, you've got to exemplify those values if you're going to
defend them. You describe yourself as a
national conservative. Why national?
Why not just conservative? It's exactly you said that if
you're not a national conservative, you're not a
conservative. It's a very good, very good
question, Matt. I think in many ways the
adjective national should be redundant when it comes to
stating one's political position in philosophical position in
politics as as conservative. I think that all conservatives
want to conserve what they love most, and the nation is one of
the things that one loves. It's not the most important
thing that the conservatives loves.
They love family, they love community, they love
neighborhood culture and heritage and so on.
But the nation is on high on the list of what a conservative
wants to conserve. So in a way, you're right to
pick me up on that. Why national?
I think the answer to that is that that adjective has forced
itself to the surface in recent years.
And as conservatism itself at the right itself has fractured,
probably since Thatcher under the influence of figures like
Hayek, economic liberalism, particularly neoliberalism.
Thatcher would not have described herself as a National
Conservative. No, she well.
Said I'm a conservative and I'm very patriotic of.
Course, in the 1980s she wouldn't have needed to use I
think the adjective because I think the the headwinds of
liberalism, particularly globalism and increasingly the
rise of empirics, sort of very self confident imperialistic
civilisational cultures like Russia and China are as it were
undermining national sovereignty, undermining the
basic principle that makes it possible for us to use the first
person plural when we're talking about our country.
That is a very what? Do you mean by that?
Well, here's what I mean by it. We, in fact, we use the word we
when we're talking about our fellow countrymen, generally
speaking, in a way that doesn't seem at all controversial.
And now that's very important. For example, if we want high
rates of redistributive taxation, you need to, there
needs to be that feeling that we're all in it together, that
we owe each other duties as fellow citizens, that we will
care for strangers because they are are strangers and we have an
obligation to them. And I think one of the problems
in the last 20 years on trade, on migration, on increasingly
supranational bodies that are increasingly disconnected from
electorates where there's a rising democratic, a democratic
deficit, there's a sense that there is no longer a we.
But what we have to say is just not cutting through to the
people who are supposed to be implementing what we have to
say. But the social contract is
fraying. But are you talking about your
we? Are we talking about the we that
is, you know, middle class and white and Christian?
There are lots of different ways aren't?
There. Well, look, I mean, one of the
things that struck me being a lone Brexiteer in Oxbridge was
that as a white middle class Christian Brit, I was actually
cutting against the grain of almost everyone around me.
And I found myself increasingly wanting to speak up for all the
Brexiteers among the staff who were waiting at our hand and
foot and the Browns. That's.
Brexit, which is 1 particular. Policy.
And not about the. Identity National conservatism
is born in 2016. It is born with the twin shocks
of Brexit and Trump. Something that is relevant to
you as someone working at university and that is the
decision of the federal government.
You know, also your friend JD Vance, who's not criticised it,
to cut the funding, the federal funding for Harvard universities
and six other elite universities in the United States because
they've decided to, you know, to stand against the administration
when it comes to certain requirements, restrictions that
they wanted to impose on these universities.
What do you think of that as an academic?
I think the question of public funding of the UK universities
is a very often sets up a very different set of policy issues
and questions and concerns from the question of U.S.
Federal funding of US universities, not least because
US universities have enormous amounts of money.
I mean, let's face it, Harvard has, is basically a hedge fund
with a university attached. It's got $53 billion under
management. You know it is not in desperate
need. It's not missing there.
Of taxpayer subsidy in middle America, especially when if I
could just conclude especially when the Supreme Court found two
years ago that Harvard for years has been practicing a policy of
race based discrimination against Asian Americans in
favour of more favoured ethnic minorities and and you know that
is something which deeply concerns the government, I think
concerns American taxpayers American taxpayers want to see
money go to intellectual cultures and institutions that
pursue freedom of inquiry. That model balanced reasonable
disagreement about issues that Americans care about The trouble
is as I as I know from having I just got back from Berkeley in
the United States I actually had a wonderful time and Berkeley's
making great great strides on this front.
But many of the Ivy League universities are simply not
reflecting the very real differences that are tearing
America apart. And one of the primary public
functions of university, in my view, is to inform an electorate
and to model good disagreement on issues that reasonable
Americans, reasonable citizens, disagree violently about,
especially in a polarised culture.
Right, so all. That the US can do effectively
is say, look, we expect federal subsidy from American taxpayers
to be spent in a way that reflects the public good and
does not privilege an ideologically captured client
class of American. Academic, but this is this is
about, you said it yourself, it's about the freedom to learn,
which is also the freedom to research.
These institutions would say that even though they have huge
amounts of money from the private sector, the kind of
money they need in order to do the kind of research that has
made American University is great, that has made America
great, you know, into the sciences, into medicine, that
is, that relies on federal funding.
And when that federal funding is cut because they refuse to do
certain things that the government asks them to do, you
know, that's bad news for America at the end of the day,
isn't it? I think these are very blunt
tools, but they are maybe the only tools available to an
administration that wants to restore American universities to
where they were. And I haven't seen any argument
from the left or right. What do you mean to where they
were? What do you mean by that?
Well. To where?
American American universities
were at their very peak in the late 20th century.
They were great engines of research.
That's still great engines of research.
If I were an American, I would want to see universities
flourish, and I wouldn't in particular would want to see
universities reflect to the very real debates that are happening
off Harvard Square in Main Street America.
And as we know, American politics is getting more and
more polarized on a whole range of issues.
And nobody doubts that. Trump vans.
They were elected unambiguously back in November.
Thank goodness. That was no doubt at all.
Now, is it the case that every single policy action perfectly
reflects every campaign promise? No.
But my goodness, what politician can claim that they're able to
do that? I think that real moral scandal
would have been if they'd spent months and months, years and
years and saying, we're saying we're going to bring in tariffs,
we're going to try and sort out Ukraine.
We're going to try and get a. And then do nothing.
And then do absolutely nothing. That would have been a
Democratic. Outbreak, but Donald.
Authoritarian is saying we're simply exercising our executive.
Authority. You can you can implement the
will of our election. But you can live up to those
promises, but do it in the right way and do the more nuanced way.
You want them to be more cuddly? I can't make Donald Trump be
more cuddly. Doctor James, Always of the
philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, thanks
very much for letting us talk to you in your home.
That's it from the the special edition of the Forecast.
Hope you enjoyed it.