10/29/14 – Jeffrey Tucker – The Scott Horton Show

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All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm joined on the line by Jeffrey Tucker from Liberty.me, among other things.
Welcome back to the show, how are you doing?
Fantastic, thanks for putting me on the show today.
Well, very happy to have you here.
So listen, I got an email from a friend, long-time listener of the show, who said that he used to sit in on Murray Rothbard's classes at UNLV back in the early 1990s and he said that something that Murray liked to talk about a lot was post-millennial something-something, whatever you call it, Protestant Christianity, and basically, I think, Yankee do-gooderism would be one way to kind of sum it up.
And he liked to talk about the history of it and how it would pop up in Murray's words all the time.
It was always popping up here and there, these kinds of different Christian outlooks on politics.
And I think many of my listeners, and I don't spend nearly enough time covering this subject either, but many of my listeners are more familiar with John Hagee and maybe Jimmy Swaggart and this kind of Protestant, what's called the pre-millennialist dispensationalist, the Christians United for Israel, those kind of guys, that they want Jesus to come back and kill everyone and then create paradise on earth.
Nobody wants to die alone, right?
Well, so they want to see the whole world go with them, I guess.
And so we're pretty familiar with that.
But there's this whole other kind of progressive do-gooderism in America that I think in this day and age we don't really identify with Protestant Christianity.
We tend to think of somebody like Hillary Clinton, for example, as more of a secular type, maybe even an atheist.
Anyway, so I know there's a lot to it, and I know that you've written a lot about it.
Can we start with what is exactly, what is it meant by pre-millennialist versus post-millennialist Protestant Christian?
Let's just kind of dig in here.
Just a bit of background on Murray now.
Murray was writing and talking about this subject a lot during the period in which a friend was there because he was working on his history of economic thought at the time, and the way he would run his classes is that he would just talk about what he was researching at the time.
So that was his subject at the time, that's what he cared about.
And the results you can find in his history of economic thought, particularly Volume 1.
So what Murray kept bumping into in the history of ideas was this idea of millenarianism, which is a kind of certain perspective within a subject generally called eschatology.
And I think eschatology comes from the word eschatone or something like that, meaning that's the end of times, basically like how the world is going to end.
And how you think the world is going to end is going to be determinative of what you think history is doing now.
So if you think everything is going to get worse and worse and worse, you probably think it's getting worse now.
If you think it's going to get better and better, you probably think it's getting better now.
Because people don't tend to think of the end of the world as coming in, say, 150,000 years.
They figure it's probably going to happen before they die for whatever reason.
Anyway, so within millenarianism, by the way, this is an obsession of Protestant Christianity.
It's typically not, you're not going to find anything about this in Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
You're not going to find it in Roman Catholicism.
It's a kind of Bible-based Christianity, typically associated with fundamentalism.
So what Murray was doing is he was looking through the early socialist experiments.
And he was amazed to find in the latter part of the Middle Ages, talking about 13th, 14th century, that there's a series of socialist experiments that took place in various parts of Europe.
And they were not driven by a kind of a secularist Marxian longing for plenty or anything like that.
They're almost always religious cults.
So they're all based on this kind of religious frenzies, which were kind of more or less considered to be heretics by Orthodox Christianity at the time.
But this was the origin of socialism.
It began as a kind of a religious idea.
So Murray got very curious about this because he was very interested in the thing which gives life to the state.
And he kept finding again and again that religious belief was far predated secularist Hegelianism or anything as a kind of a driving force for statism.
So he began to investigate this sort of perspective on millenarianism and found that there's generally two views, pre-millennialist and post-millennialist.
Pre-millennialist didn't really come along in a big way into the 19th century.
But post-millennialism is a kind of a late medieval heresy.
Generally, pre-millennialism believes that everything is going to get worse and worse and worse and worse until Jesus just gets fed up and says, to hell with all of you.
Comes down, depending on which version of pre-millennialism you believe, plucks out the believers and slaughters everybody else.
And then history comes to an end and it makes everything right.
Post-millennialism believes that it's up to us as individuals to prepare the way that we have to kind of right the world, purge all sin, beautify all things, get rid of all mistakes, flaws, everything terrible in the world.
And we have to be in a rush to do this because we have to prepare this beautiful world for Christ to come and inhabit.
That's the post-millennial version of this.
And if you get in a real rush for this, there's really only one way forward.
And that's by using the state.
So post-millennialism and statism are sort of bound up with each other in the history of ideas.
And so we do see in the pre-millennialists, that is, those that we typically identify as like the right wingers, the right wingers, the John Hageeites and them, that even though, I guess, supposedly according to the doctrine, they're really just supposed to sit around and wait for Jesus to come back and have the Armageddon, they're certainly not supposed to make things worse in order to send the whole world, make the whole world so sinful that it finally provokes them into coming back.
But, for example, they have this doctrine that they have to support Israel and that supposedly that'll make Jesus come back faster, something like that.
But I guess that's kind of a marginal part.
That's sort of a side issue with them.
Whereas you're saying with these post-millennialists, they must create what the pre-millennialists think Jesus will create someday magically.
They must create it with democratic politics here in the world in order to, and that's how they are going to force Jesus to come back a thousand years from now.
Right.
There's a couple of branches within pre-millennialism.
One tends to be a little bit quietest and they just sit around waiting on a mountain or just praying at home, waiting for the return of Christ.
And the other version of pre-millennialism is always looking for signs that it's coming, like, oh my God, look, here's another sign, here's another sign.
So Middle East politics figures into this kind of in a big way.
And, of course, you're incentivized as a pre-millennialist to not just look for signs but to interpret those signs in a particular way and even see them realized more vibrantly and vividly in the world.
So there is an element of that.
Yeah, but the post-millennialists, now there you get into the real danger.
And post-millennialism, in Murray's view, kind of migrates throughout history and it travels over the centuries and lands basically in the late 19th century in the U.S.
Following a quarter century of rising prosperity, incredible technology, increased levels of human liberation, declines of, you know, feudal states declining, monarchies crumbling.
And it seems like this is sort of this emerging dawn of something.
And that kind of gave rise to a secular version of post-millennialism.
Essentially, a generation gets into a rush to purge the world of all evil and sin.
And so in his writings on World War I, he sees what he calls post-millennial pietism.
Post-millennialism meaning the direction of history is always going towards the light.
Pietism is the desire to purge the world of all sinful behavior, mistakes, errors, and, you know, impieties.
All right, now I'm sorry we've got to hold it there and take this break, but we'll be right back, everybody, with Jeffrey Tucker talking about the post-millennialists, do-gooder liberals, progressives, kingdom come by Murray Rothbard and World War I as fulfillment.
St. Hillary and the religious left as well, that issue.
Hey, you own a business?
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My email address is scott at scotthorton.org.
I don't know, man, I always liked that Bill Moyers quote about the delusional are no longer marginal, but when were the delusional not in charge?
That's what I want to know.
I'm talking with Jeffrey Tucker from liberty.me, and we're talking about Murray Rothbard and his work on the post-millennialists.
Here are a few articles for your enjoyment.
World War I as fulfillment, power and the intellectuals.
St. Hillary and the religious left and kingdom come, the politics of the millennium.
So we're not talking about the right-wing born-again, forced Jesus to come back and nuke Israel and rapture us all to heaven like the new absolutely horrible Nicolas Cage movie that you shouldn't even waste the bandwidth downloading from the Pirate Bay.
But no, we're talking about the Hillary Clinton types and their kind of Yankee do-gooderism, not trying to force Jesus to come back soon and blow up the world so that then we can have paradise, but trying to create paradise on Earth so that then after a thousand years of that, boy, they've got to hold it a long time, after a thousand years of that, then that's how to force Jesus to come back, they say.
So now we were talking about the Pietists and the something else I forgot right at the break there, so we've got to cover sort of as you're talking about the early history of these movements and then what it has to do with modern-day progressive or liberalism.
Well, the post-millennial Pietists, so they have this vision of history that it's all headed towards ever better conditions for humankind, ever more peace, prosperity, but also moral purity turns out to be a really important thing.
But here's the thing, this all comes to be secularized and not really, it's like a secularized religion.
So this moral purity turns out to be, basically purity is defined by the civic culture and the civic religion rather than the Bible or anything like that.
In the US, of course, it was very much geographically centered in the Northeast, particularly in Boston, particularly among Presbyterians and Episcopalians.
They decided they would use the means of the state to bring in this world of sort of perfect flourishing.
And this is essentially the origin of public schooling.
The suffragettes were very much bound up with post-millennial Pietist theory, prohibitionism and World War I in particular.
And what's interesting about this is that it was, like in the case of the suffragettes, these were mostly wives of very, very wealthy, well-to-do sort of elites.
And similarly with prohibition, it was the same sort of situation.
But this sort of Yankee, Northeastern intellectual, post-millennial Pietistic elite, intellectual was also pushing for universal education.
They couldn't stand sectarian religious impulses from particularly immigrant ethnics, like Italians and the Irish and that sort of thing.
They really wanted this kind of universalist, secularized version of Protestant, post-millennial Pietism.
Murray relied on a lot of research from religious scholars to explain all of this in his works.
So he wasn't the first one to talk about this impulse, but he detected it very much alive in American politics.
And it's still alive now.
It's still around, really.
Well, I want to get back to that in a second.
But as far as back then with the First World War and conscription and eugenics and all these kind of programs, I read a thing one time by Jesse Walker at Reason, who's the best guy at Reason, of course.
And it was about how the KKK were progressive.
And now we would just think of the KKK.
That simply means reactionary, right-wing, nationalist, racist, some kind of conservative, certainly right-wing in every way.
What in the world does that have to do with progressivism?
Does it have to do with this post-millennialism?
It's the same thing.
I mean, the Klan had two very strong interests, and they were basically identical to the intellectual elite's interests.
They just had a cruder way of going about it.
There's two critical things.
One was to purify the demographic landscape of all inferiors, you know, anybody that they didn't feel like was worthy of reproducing themselves so they could create a homogeneous population that was, you know, sort of naturally superior.
And this meant basically Northeastern white liberals.
You know, they were worthy of propagating and nobody else really was.
The second thing is this mindset really resents religious sectarianism or what they regard as religious sectarianism.
So Jews who live in ghettos, Catholics who, you know, pray the rosary and adhere to the faith of their homeland, you know, Islam and their wacky views.
I mean, there's a tremendous and intense resentment against religious otherness, you know.
So, yeah, this was exactly...
And the Klan, you know, vacillated in the earlier part of the 20th century between making racial purity its dominant ideology and also anti-Catholicism, actually.
It was very much part of the Klan-style ideology.
So these things all go together.
I mean, it's very interesting because you look at professors at Harvard and then you look at the guys in the white hoods and you don't think they have anything in common.
But a century ago, their views were essentially identical.
Well, you know, I'm reminded of this quote of Hillary Clinton, which I probably should try to do the research and see if anybody actually has the video of this somewhere on YouTube or something.
But she actually at one point said, you know, please don't make the mistake and call me a liberal because, you know, the root word of that is liberty.
And that's really not at all what I'm about.
What I believe in is progress as, you know, decided by people like me.
But she wanted to differentiate.
Please don't confuse these two issues as being the same.
I don't want any connection to the idea that it's really up to you.
That's really interesting.
I hadn't heard that before.
But that actually makes sense.
I mean, you get this even in speeches of Obama.
There's a very kind of creepy absence of tolerance towards the idea, the chaos that's associated with liberty.
They really want an ordered world and they don't like the sort of messy process of gradually building society bit by bit through trial and error.
They don't like that.
They've got a plan in mind and they want it imposed.
They have very little appreciation for the contribution that human liberty made to building civilization.
They just don't.
I mean, you can read through all of...everything Obama's ever written or said and not really detect this at all.
It's the same thing with Hillary.
I mean, there's a kind of...
This gets way ahead.
What does Hillary have to do with this at all anyway?
And we're almost out of time.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
So, I mean, look.
I mean, she's, you know, she comes out of this background.
This is basically her ideology.
She's a recreation of the same sort of mindset that existed a century ago.
Just an unrelated...
I mean, you can trace this through her church in Illinois where she grew up and this kind of thing?
Well, probably not.
Her family history?
Probably her education more so than anything else.
I mean, she sort of drank deeply from this elitist, WASP-y, post-millennial, let's fix up the world using the state kind of ideology.
And that's all she's ever really believed in.
That's why she got into politics in the first place.
And for these people...
You know, it frustrates people like you and me because we're like, look, your stupid wars haven't worked.
Your dumb central plans have failed again and again.
Why can't you see it?
Well, they can't see it because it's a religious idea to them.
They're totally dedicated to power as the means by which they're going to purify the world of what they see as evil.
And nothing will ever shake them up.
I don't care how many articles we write or podcasts we deliver.
For them, it's a religious idea.
And this is why I think Murray Rothbard got interested in the subject.
And I understand why he did because it does get extremely frustrating.
It's like, wait a minute, this is supposed to be an age of science.
Why isn't statism and war, why aren't these things just declared as empirically invalid?
Well, they're not because of this total faith that is entrenched in the mindset of a certain demographic.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny because especially in my line of work, all the focus is on Middle East wars mostly and how, you know, they are looking through these religious eyes.
But you look at somebody like Hillary Clinton, you assume she's just so secular in every way kind of thing.
But that's sort of the side of the point.
Like you say, once these people started really using the state, they decided they preferred it as their religion than any kind of real connection to Jesus or any of that stuff.
Yeah, and with all religions, you know, the evidence is actually very much not at the forefront.
You know, it's not about what works and what doesn't work.
It's about what you believe and what you don't believe.
So these people are just, you know, utterly and completely dedicated to this one way of seeing the world.
And that's their right.
I mean, I'm not going to deny anybody their right to be a secular post-millennial pietist.
That's fine.
But we need to know.
But yeah, we need to know it.
We don't want to give them control over the levers of power.
That's when things get really dangerous.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, I'm sorry we're all out of time.
We've got to go.
But thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about this with us, Jeff.
I think it's brilliant that you decided to have this show and this discussion.
So thank you.
All right.
Well, I appreciate you joining us and I'll give thanks to Mike for the recommendation.
It is a very important point.
And again, here's some footnotes for you guys.
World War I as fulfillment, power, and the intellectuals.
St. Hillary and the religious left and Kingdom Come, the politics of the millennium.
All three by Murray Rothbard about the post-millennial-arian and millennial-arianism.
Yeah.
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