About their experience during the holocaust one of the things i noticed repeatedly was people saying after they got out of the camps and after the camps were liberated, if they were liberated by the americans lets say were the british its not that was the end of the story but at least that would be the end of really imminent danger from a certain militant force. If they were liberated by the soviets its as if it was this whole other story of escape and danger that they had to go through and i started to learn about the soviet union and the sort of horrific evils committed by the soviets that began to complicate my own story of what it meant to be on the left and what it meant to have this legacy of communist Party Membership but its also during college that i started just sort of dipped my toe a little bit into activism so when i was at yale there were battles between university of frustration and the labor unions that represented the workers there and i got involved with what was called action coalition. I wrote some press releases for them and i remember, this is a useful story and understanding where i came from. I remember this relatively early in the evolution of email this long argument i got into with one of my fellow slack members. I wrote this email attacking one of the plans coming from the University Administration for wanting to pay llovera workers and wanted to bring in fast food restaurants to the university and pay lower wages to the new workers who are hired to work at the mcdonalds. I kind of had this long argument all which i agreed with until he got to the end where he said and who wants to eat dehydrogenase it meat patties with wilted lettuce and translucent tomatoes anyway . I wrote back and i said im with you on all of the stuff about the way the university wants to undermine the labor unions but i really like mcdonalds burgers and i think that was indicative of the fact that it was me beginning to articulate but indicative of the fact that though i grew up on the left with this legacy of leftwing commitments there were also ways in which it didnt totally cohere with what i was and what i liked and i think some of that was just my maturation and some of it was though that was a part of my childhood the other part was very monday and growing up in america like he mcdonalds, liking television, liking movies and the ways in which the leftwing parts of me and the other parts of me did or didnt cohere and it became more and more interesting to me and more and more pressing in terms of the need for me as i begin to think of myself as a writer to understand what that meant. So i got out of college and ended up working at the newspaper and started writing articles and i had a very supportive editor who let me write whatever i wanted to write and i had written three articles about people who would have gone from the left or the right you for noticed there was a pattern and impact of the time i was thinking of writing a whole at the book. It was going to be about the subculture of people who went to Science Fiction conventions. That was not working for all sorts of reasons. Somebody pointed out to me and they said maybe you should write a book about this. I just written a cover story for the newspaper about David Horowitz who had been self rates in the communist party family, had been one of the early activist intellectuals of the new left and in the mid70s had a real falling out with the left because the friend of his was killed probably by the black panthers and it sort of totally devastated him, pushed him and he essentially fell apart for five years and came out on the other side and started his migration to the right. Somebody pointed out to me theres a book in this broader phenomenon, left to right and a minute maybe not literally the minute but at least looking back 10 years what it feels like is the minute that was said to me it he just kind of clicked. I was already anxious about this other book idea had what seemed like a good idea but continued working for all sorts of reasons. Once that was that i really started thinking about it and i said this makes a lot of sense. I went to my wife and i said what you think of my process sciencefiction fantasy idea and she said oh please god, yes. [laughter] and so i had, so i did what writers do, i had this idea and i found an agent and wrote proposal. The first chapter or wrote was about Christopher Hitchens and i told this book proposal and i said i think i signed the contract in 2006 and i said to my agents to think its going to take me three or four years and she said you cant publish for two years. I said i will have it for you in 2008 in the back of my head i said 2009, 2010. I had kids and i got a job and i realized how incredibly slower rider i can be and then finally here we are 10 years later with the book. I think the book is a few things at the most basic level its the story of the six people who went from the left to the right and the progresses roughly chronologically through the 20th century. The first is Whittaker Chambers who was born in 1901 i believe on april fools day in 1901. He was a communist writer, communist fiction writer in the late 20s and early 30s. He was hacked by the underground party to be a spy. He ran a number of spy rings in new york before turns into the 30s he had a real crisis, broke with the party, came out the other side for a while and worked for Time Magazine and the road a lot of anticommunist material and then he wrote this great autobiography called witness about his journey with founding the National Review and concerted magazine in the 1950s. Chambers is one of the people he tapped to be one of its founding editors and was a big influence on buckley and generations of conservative sense. As a guy names named James Burnham who was raised in affluent family and a wealthy suburb of chicago went to princeton went to angle in on the scholarship came back to new york in 1929 and thought that he was going to be with the job at nyu and thought he was going to devote his life to writing about philosophy and literature. He was kind of a product of the 1920s in that sense when a lot of artists and intellectuals were not that interested in politics and thought the culture was where the most important meaning lies. Thats where he was in 1920 and then the depression hit not just him but the country like a Freight Train and he sort of struggled to figure out what to do with that and he forged on for a little while trying to write about philosophy and literature but the depression kept hitting him in the head. He finally in a sense capitulated and started writing about politics but also found himself as a writer. He was a sort of i would say almost writer when he was writing about philosophy and literature. Its something you should be caring about but hes due next week europe out of many found policy in the discussion of power and the discussion of foreignpolicy and the great global gain. And so he ended up, so we started writing and like a lot of intellectuals in the 1930s was drawn towards marxism and the particular brand of marxism he was drawn to us the trotskyists of writing he also became a leader and a relatively small group of writers and intellectuals and activists oriented around trotsky who added direct conduit to trotsky. He was that through most of the 1930s and round about the same time he started to question some of the basic orthodoxies of trotskyism and marxism and toward the end of the 1930s around the time of Whittaker Chambers was starting to break in around the time a lot of leftwing marxist intellectuals are really beginning to question marxism but also learning more and more about the soviet union and questioning their commitment to that. He broke with trotskyism entered the 1940s he was kind of a Thomas Friedman type person. Without a super ideological pasts and by the 1950s he had become conservative and also taps william f. Buckley to be one of the founding members of of would have a fair amount of influence on the right in terms of cold war thinking and policy as an intellectual for the remainder of his life primarily writing for National Review and writing a lot of looks. Ronald reagan who most of us know and who i hope all of us would know and who i certainly knew but i didnt know until i started researching this book and somebody said you should look into reagan. I had no idea yet been anything other than a conservative that he was actually a kind of solid liberal democrat for the first half of his life. His father was a die hard democrat an enormous fan of roosevelt and reagan during himself during the depression connected to him emotionally as has the sort of paternalistic charismatic father figure who is keeping the nation afloat during this time of crisis and would really start to move to the right until the end of the 1940s and early 1950s and particularly and his terms of the right was one of cold war and its increasing rarity with communism and dedication to anticommunism and the wayne would chanti communism became more of a conservative property whereas before the war and sort of before the midto late 1940s have been more of a bipartisan policy and the other thing he went to work for General Electric after his films and as a spokesperson for the company traveling across the country speaking to workers and civic groups and it happened to be a time when ge was engaged in what is probably still one of the or they most comprehensive political campaigns waged by an American Corporation history and dedicated to challenging the ideas for the new deal and labor. Though they didnt require reagan to believe the ideology that they were putting out there i think the process amherst in their literature and engaging with ideas and a dub speaking to him for a prior idea of reasons reasons began speaking to him for a variety of reasons. For a variety of reasons but started moving towards the right. And the story i tell in the book that is the most dramatic he wrote his memoir about making it about his own desire for success and ambition and they imagine that this book was going to establish himself to push him a notch up in the status hierarchy of american letters and it was going to put him on par with his good friend Norman Mailer. That was his hope and expectation and the opposite happened. The book got totally trashed by the critics including friends and colleagues of him and including Norman Mailer himself. Things fell apart for a few years i went into a deep depression. And when he came out the other side, he hadnt moved as far as he ultimately voted in a profound way. I think almost in a way even more dramatic than the other people this temperament seemed to have changed. And on the other side, depression and the transformation seemed as if he had aged in some fashion. And then David Horowitz who i mention it finally Christopher Hitchens who is somebody who i probably have more of a personal connection to more than anyone else. When i was in college i asked my leftwing father for a subscription to Time Magazine because i wanted to be up on the times. It horrified my dad that i would even want this magazine that he ordered me he said you can have Time Magazine but im going to give you the nation as well, the subscription to the magazine and i started reading Christopher Hitchens and i was just blown away. He was on the left seems to take so much pleasure and acceleration. There was this enormously exciting thing for me. Then when he started to move to the right but then after 9 11 and i dont know if you ever went over to the right move to full speed away from the left that was difficult for me. Probably half the people in the room have stories of meeting or drinking with Christopher Hitchens. I never met him in person. But as an intellectual hero and model, his movement was pretty painful for me. So those are the six people in the book and i just want to give you a sense of kind of my perspective and how i think about this. I want to read from the end of the book which i presume most of you havent done yet. So im sort of talking about, im talking about this notion i have about what kind of perspective one needs to have to do the kind of writing i find most exciting and interesting and i guess what i am probably trying to do and i might go a little bit further and say that this is almost a characterization of what it looks like to have healthy political belief. The trick, which isnt a trick at all but the basic art of living is to be grounded in a strong sense of self, that the tune to ones inner frictions. Its to be passionate and ones convictions but also open to the experience and evidence of error. Its to accept that there is no end to the uncertainty except death and its to be willing to step forward with as much courage and creativity as you can muster when the old strategies and defenses wont do the trick anymore. Its not the point of the book to make the case that we should all be on the right or the left. I have my opinions and im sticking to them for now. These men have their own opinions and changed them in some cases productively and others less so but maybe its the point of these lives are worth approaching with interest regardless because there is a depth of humanity that can be achieved by any of us only when we reckon bravely with what is in conflict rather than run away from it or deny its existence. And these are people who reckon with themselves the most terrifying fundamental level. If we dont all like what they ended up on the far side of their encounter is beside the point. It makes the point. It requires risk to turn against ones former side is to take an enormous psychological gamble. Its to let go of who you were and very possibly not finding an identity on thofidentity on thet is coherent and functional. You might alienate friends, coworkers, family, community. You might have to live your life with the fear that he gave it up for nothing and the payoff if there is one is awfully hard and bitter tasting. By paying close and sustained attention to these perilous journeys by asking ourselves where they find right and wrong and to extending our sympathy as far as they can go and imagining ourselves where we could make similar choices perhaps we could learn a something to better live our own lives to be more aware of the possibilities and to be more bold and humble somehow at the same time. Thank you. [applause] should people come up here. This gimmick if you choose to answer one of them thats fine. So first you are thinking about moving from the left to the right. Is there a tendency that we see from moving to the right to the left, this is number one. Number two, it seems like you are a perfect person to talk a little bit about Bernie Sanders. My question was to talk about the movement or if there is a tendency among some famous people to move from the right to the left. Another one i said that maybe you are the perfect person to Say Something about Bernie Sanders and it was something insightful that would be really interesting to us. And i guess the third is an observation that i grew up in the soviet union and that Ronald Reagan was our hero. There are people that move from right to left an and ensure demographically if you look at the Voter Registration and the ideological that the numbers are sort of shifting all the time and in fact in recent years i think probably broadly its been more significant and actually if you look among the writers and intellectuals who run by and large interest and thats where you see a kind of interesting cohort of people like andrew sullivan, bruce bartlett, connor and others have moved from the left to the right in reaction to a lot of the actions of the Bush Administration and the war in iraq and afghanistan. That is the point of a lot of these movements and also these kind of stories like the ones i tell happening in reaction to a kind of big Political Movement or moment in which one side or the other is ascendant and maybe from peoples perspective goes to access so the big left to right movement that i deal with at least some sort of after the 30s and response to all the leftwing energy of the 1930s and the interest in communism and then also in reaction to the 1960s to the blac black feminism and rights and so i think that the reason that we are seeing more right to left recently is because that big movement and i would certainly say the exodus has been a rightwing access and theres been a reaction to that. I would guess now we seem to be in a momen the moment that boths are kind of have a lot of energy and illogical passion. I didnt write about the right to life because coming from the left that journey eve even thoui didnt make it is more interesting and one i can have more empathy with and i also think at least historically the intellectuals. It would be the leftwing activist writers into that have been more significant. There wasnt the same history of right to left. Bernie sanders i dont actually have a lot insightful to say. The only thing i will say, and i wrote something about donald trump recently who has been all over the place in the partisan affiliation and in my mind at least i was comparing him to Bernie Sanders who has been very consistent and theres different appeals the political actors made for people so i think part of the appeal is that sort of consistency over time and commitment over time and that promises a certain kind of politics. Then theres somebody i write about like donald trump wea when a sense, his sort of changeability and the danger of it is his own promise. The promise of disruption so thats not really so much and competing the political appeal. Its interesting ive heard things like that about how hes kind of there would be interesting to hear from the former soviet mouth. We lived and worked in russia for a number of years and one of the families that we knew there was a member who had been in the system and it fell apart it took a couple of years not more for the same person to be totally devoutly orthodox in the Orthodox Church so im wondering the people who had written about if there is a personality trait or something of the need for orthodoxy where it doesnt matter what the actual philosophy is that you could have one thats sort of all encompassing and people need to have that. That orientation towards the orthodoxy in the book i talk about the language that i use that tends to be more the desire for the system in order in a kind of scheme that would give a kind of meaning and that is a type and i guess where i would differ from what you are saying is a i would be careful about saying that it wasnt matter what the system is because i think that can be that identification of some of these people as ideological types of people that are drawn to orthodoxy but it can sometimes be the means of dismissing we should resist for the people in this book at least and maybe not for this guy that thos guide dok of their attachment to their various leftwing systems and the universe of belief were really profound and moving away from it isnt something any of these people did wisely. For most of them even somebody like Ronald Reagan who didnt experience a sort of pain by moving towards the righ right it still took them about, you know, a good 15 years to make it there to space out that paying. But it is a tight and also talking about this with someone the other day, i am like the opposite type. It would be interesting for some people but i come into the presence of those that think that its powerful enough to sort of order of the world and all the data and the messiness of the world and i get kind of allergic to it. My tribe can be in frustrating to but part of the interest of the book is me bristling with those in that other tribe and seeing its interesting and compelling as opposed. We talk about the disillusionment in the 30s and 40s. Was that an influenza, and a fellow with your couple months ago getting the same question. I think they are by the writers published late 1940s and early 1950s included richard wright, stephen spender, a few others. It was an influence. If theres such a thing as a canon of books about this for the disillusionment of communism, thats right up there at noon and some of the stuff by George Orwell and Whittaker Chambers witness. Its a great book. Absolutely maybe in the introduction to the book it doesnt quote the god that failed but its a review of the god that failed by isaac who was a sort of imminent writer. And it was a sort of part of that effect then to h. W. Brands who wrote this biography i interviewed him on a panel and let me tell you when ronald rond reagan. Nancy i didnt see a lot of really direct evidence that fell under the sway but theres no question that he is marrying nancy which was part of a larger process moving into a world that was more conservative have an influence but by the time it occurred to him it was more conservative than liberal. He didnt have to face that question will i break up with friendships because the people that were pretty conservative. A couple of thoughts as a middleage white male phenomenon you are talking about and i would say particularly when men gewomen getmore liberal as theyr and having the experience in European Countries for 25 years i dont think people are so idealistic which means they dont fall off it quite so dramatically. I think that its about idealism and thats loss of idealism, but i still think that the majority of people who grew up on the left to stay on the left whether we are talking about your father or my dad or uncle that grew up in the Lower East Side of new york and they just may not have been quite as leftwing as they were. I was doing some research the other day and this broad demographic question isnt my area of expertise that i found some papers that were talking about how productive it was, and one of the things they found is if you didnt grow up in a very political household, your parents politics are not predicted but if you grew up in a house like mine it was Something Like 80 chance that he would be broadly at the same political orientation. I am still of the left. So no way there is plenty of people who were in the same environment as these six men as you pointed out that i will talk about them in the second. But they may be selfsame falls in the orthodoxies of the left into sort of throwing it all over this if maybe we need to let go and maybe i will disaffiliated from the communist party but i will become a democrat or member of the socialist party. Absolutely. That is probably the more common experience i was interested in this extreme wind because the bigger transition in part allowed me to explore and revealed how complicated the belief is. You dont see the guts of it as much went to b when to be spittm the left to the right is trauma and depression and an explosion of their lives you can see the belief more clearly. I dont know if it is a more male phenomenon. The book is about six guys that i dplaying a little embarrassed. The only defense i can mount is part of why i started my own storwith myown story it is a bie struggle for me. Im looking for people that remind me of myself and kind of wrestling with the beliefs of my father and grandfather and Christopher Hitchens and sees te people like David Horowitz who kind of looks like my father and grandfather. But if what you said feels right like a male phenomenon but i dont know if that is true. Do you think theres some psychology because there are people that have been on the left that have experienced the excess and havent made such a break or have a transcending change in their belief system. You see any commonalities among this study or any indication of why they were able to completely turn their belief system upside down . The book is all about psychology. I mentioned at the beginning my wife was deeply involved in the buck in psychology so that part of the world i lived in a very intimate microbe sends it to the deepest part of my interest as the psychology belief were not necessarily suggesting this but its also an effort to say the book is also to ward off the people who would say people shifted because of their psychology because from my perspective it is all of our psychologies. Theres nothing else other than who we are and what our psyche is and what are our fears on the vulnerabilities into our family was and what our genes are. And i dont say that to dismiss it, but just to complicate them. Was there something in common . I think because they were different in certain ways there were people who were atypical for most of us in the politics was absolutely embedded at the core of their identity. They were drawn with the main exception as intellectuals they were drawn to the system of ideas and when that started to break down they probably had a harder time than we would have because it through some stand ad the machinery of this complicated system and they were people who needed to believe in sort of believe passionately to an extent beyond what most of us experience and theres another reason why that kind of modified belief was not very appealing to them. It wasnt appealing to them to sort of become good liberals are social democrats or Something Like that. In fact, one thing that a lot of people share on the right and left was an active contempt for the precise kind of person for liberals. But were they able in the kind of all or nothing lets say hypothetically. It depends on the person editing this has to do with something i sort of talk about that are sort of temperament or characters that seem disposed to one side or the other. Its Whittaker Chambers who was able to live a sort of i would say full more mature wife on the right for his greatest commitment i would say. It was a system i see this as a secular person. It was marxism and theres other examples and i think that counter example in the sense, David Horowitz to this day i talked to him and to this day he is sort of profoundly angry about this trauma that he experienced what he blames on the left and he blames on himself and doesnt se seem or contempt that hes written a few books in these last its kind of about how content he is and at peace with the universe. If you talk to him for five minutes but isnt clear so it depends on the person that i bui think that there are people who i think he was a much more at least as a writer more interesting and compelling writer on the left. It would be the epigram at the beginning of the book. I would be happy to sign books. Feel free to email me if you have any questions im not hard to find good to the university of texas website. For example Haystack Rock on oregon coast where my wife and i were married is a treasure to us and i think from the standpoint of the parks i mentioned the National Park this is a treasure enjoyed by not just people from the United States but all over the world. Its 14 years older than the park service itself and its the recreation and wilderness. This is a place like no other, the solitude for example this something that is treasured by all in a couple of years ago there was an effort to fly helicopters over the lake and i stepped in and blocked it because this sort of outcry. Its a huge economic engine for the country it produces for example 61 million worth of revenue every single year by friends and neighbors and guests from all over the world because this would be a very special time to recognize what is best about our country. This of course is the big party, the hundredth anniversary. Its because we have said in our country to spark debate about the parks are special places. When theres a debate about the services that were most important to americans, and our people said just dont mess with americas special places. Follow our coverage of the National Park servicnational pah anniversary live on thursday from the robert e. Lee memorial from Arlington National cemetery. [inaudible] good evening and welcome to barnes noble upper west side. Tonight i have the pleasure to introduce author sean, he is it George Henry Davis 1886 professor of professor of American History at princeton university. His author of the rise of american democracy, bob dylan in america and many other works. He brings us his new book, the politicians and egalitarians he reminds us of the commanding role Party Politics have played in our struggle against economic inequality of the nations founding americans believe that wealth extreme would destroy their revolutionary experiment in republican government. That idea has shaped National Political conflict. The author transforms our understanding of the political and moral character. Historian and intellectual, Henry Louis Gates junior writes, he has a vast knowledge of the american past while exploring in his unique way the interplay between raw Party Politics and the avenue and flow of reform effort. Offering his take on political figures, he challenges us to debate history and ideas in a way that honors the best of the democratic system he has written about so provocatively throughout his career. Even when i most disagree with him his arguments are always vigorous, passionate, lively, and engaging. Please join me in welcoming our author. [applause]. Thank you for that lovely introduction. Thank you for coming out on a rainy night. Its its great to be back home. Its great to be here. It seems to rain when im here, i dont know why that is. The book tonight is that the politicians and the a gala terriens. A. A few words a background. Im going to read a fair amount because thats the best way to get across with the book is about but a little bit of background sometimes you write a book without realizing youre writing it. I was very much the case with this book back in 2001 i wrote an essay about egalitarianism in american political life. Was about economic egalitarianism, called the lost a gala terrien tradition and i came came out just after 9 11 and nobody cared. It bombed. As for as i know the editor and i are the only two people who read it. Some years some years later i was thinking about politics and post partisanship and just at the time when president obama was becoming more partisan and that kind of fell away too. But i realized that in fact those two essays put together actually had an argument to them. The more i thought about that argument the more i realized that i had been making that argument for very long time. In one way or or another. In a variety of essays and reviews and all sorts of things. I looked over that a lot and thought well, its a fair amount of work, theres a book here on this theme of politics, a gala terrien some, Party Politics and how they Work Together and how they have worked together in the american past. So, here here it is. This is the result. The politicians and the e gala terrien maybe the key to this is that this wonderful. Its in the title the ampersand is about the end, very often americans think of political life the egalitarians against the politicians. They think they are all a bunch of kooks. While american politics i argue works its best when those two groups emerge. You can actually understand the great events of American History in those moments. They are very unusual. When the politicians and the egalitarians actually converge. That is what this book is about. It is a book of parts. It begins, its not just, it does have a moral purpose. That moral purpose is underlined in the epigraph. It really sums up what this book is about. So i will read it. It may be well for the statesman to know that statesmanship easily degenerates into opportunism and opportunism cannot be distinguished tween dishonesty. The prophet are to realize that his higher perspective and the uncompromising nature of his judgments always has a note of irresponsibility in it. Francis of assisi may have been a better christian than pope mike the third. It may be questions whether his moral superiority was as absolute as it seemed. Nor is there any reason to believe that abraham lincoln, the statesmen and opportunists was morally inferior to William Lloyd garrison, the profit. The statesmen must be judged in terms that take account for the limitations of Human Society which the statesmen must of the prophet need not consider. Its. That is the moral underpinning of this book. I laid out in the internet now read more from there. There are two keys to unlocking the secrets of american politics in american political history