Professor Robert P. George and Rafael Mangual explore the enduring foundations of American constitutionalism and what they reveal about human nature, power, and freedom. Drawing on the vision of the Founding Fathers, George explains why structural limits on authority—not just good intentions—are essential to preserving liberty.
The discussion moves beyond theory to the tensions between liberty and equality in modern America. Professor George also reflects on the state of higher education, making a compelling case for viewpoint diversity and intellectual humility on campus.
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Audio Transcript
Rafael Mangual: Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal Podcast. I am your host, Raphael Mangual, and I am so, so, so excited to be joined by our guest of honor, Professor Robert George. Welcome to the show.
Robert George: Thank you, Rafael. It’s a great pleasure to be on with you.
Rafael Mangual: I’m so excited for this episode. I don’t know if you know this, but you are actually our first external guest on the City Journal Podcast, which is great.
Robert George: What an honor!
Rafael Mangual: And I can’t think of anyone better to have. So I mean, there’s so much that I want to talk to you about, but you are the director of the James Madison Program at Princeton University. And James Madison just happens to be my favorite founding father. He is also the author of my favorite Federalist Paper, which is Federalist 10. That’s right.
Robert George: Oh, there you go. Human nature.
Rafael Mangual: That’s right. That’s right. And so I thought I’d just start with a question about James Madison. I mean, what is it about him that you find most admirable?
Robert George: Well, first let me say, Rafael, what a pleasure it is to be on with you. I’m a big fan of City Journal. I’ve been reading it for years, benefiting from reading it for years and years. I’m also a big fan of the Manhattan Institute, and I’m just delighted to see the institute flourishing under Reihan’s very distinguished leadership. Well, what do I admire about Madison? Just about everything.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah.
Robert George: But if I had to pinpoint something, it was his deep wisdom in trying to design a Republican government that would not fail. Why would it not fail? Because it took seriously human nature. Federalist 10 is all about the need to make sure that the design of the government is not some utopian design.
Robert George: We’re not designing government for angels. We’re not designing government for-
Rafael Mangual: Well, if men were angels, no government would be necessary.
Robert George: That’s not quite true, actually. I can tell you why, but the basic insight that he’s after there, I think, is true. The government has to be designed with human nature in mind. And human nature has its glories, but human nature has its deep faults and flaws and foibles. One of the things that Madison learned as a student at Princeton from his great teacher, John Witherspoon, also a signer of the Declaration of Independence, only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence.
Rafael Mangual: I wasn’t aware of that.
Robert George: Presbyterian minister, that’s right, from Scotland. One of the things he learned from Witherspoon, he being Madison, learned from Witherspoon, is just how flawed human nature is. And that all comes out in Federalist Number 10.
Robert George: Human beings can be very selfish, very mean, very cruel. We know this from our own experience, from human history. Now, we have our virtues as well, and Madison understands that, but he knew we had to design our government, if the Republic was to succeed, something no previous Republic had done, they’d all failed. And when they’d failed, many had collapsed into the worst forms of tyranny. But he knew that if it were to succeed, it had to be in line with human nature. It had to take human nature with all its virtues, but all its flaws very seriously.
Rafael Mangual: I want to talk a little bit about how he guards against our worst nature. He talks a lot about the dangers of factions and understands that political power is one of the most corrupting kinds of power. And so if you create a government where it’s just sort of dominated by a majority, that can be just as bad as the tyranny of one person. And so he designed a government that I think a lot of people wrongly criticize today. You often hear people lament that Congress doesn’t do enough and that the government doesn’t do enough and that it’s impossible to reach agreement. And I always remind people, “Well, that’s kind of by design.” So talk a little bit about how the counter-majoritarian ideal sort of helps guard against that aspect of human nature.
Robert George: Sure. So Madison was a student of history. He looked at the history of republics in the ancient world, in the medieval period, the Renaissance city states and so forth. And of course, the record of Republicanism of republican government was a record of failure. And as I said a moment ago, very often when a republic fell, it collapsed into the worst forms of tyranny. So he asked himself the question, “Does that mean that human beings are just incapable of self-government?” That’s what Republican government is, right?
Robert George: Lincoln referred to government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Well, all government is government of the people. All good government is government for the people. That is in the interests of the people, not in the interest of the kings. Even in the case of a benign monarch, the king rules not in the interest of himself or his party or his family or his clan or his tribe, but in the interest of the community as a whole. Republican government is government by the people, but it always failed. Is that, Madison asks himself, because we just can’t govern ourselves, it’s just impossible? There’s no way to construct a Republic given human nature that can succeed. So the best we can hope for is benign despotism of some sort. And of course, when you’re talking about the American founding, you can see what people might think, well, Republics have always failed.
So maybe human nature is such that we can’t govern ourselves. Maybe we need a king and we got a pretty good candidate here. We got George Washington could be king and he’s the best kind of king. He’s a king who didn’t want to be king. You don’t get a better king than that, but no Madison does not conclude, doesn’t draw the inference that human beings just are incapable of self-government. Rather, his inference is, look, since it seems to be faction that’s at the heart of collapse of republics, since it seems to be the lust for power and control, which even a majority can have. After all, it was a democracy that killed Socrates. Democracies are far from perfect because they’re made of imperfect human beings.
So his inference is, since we’ve got this problem with factions and their lust for power, isn’t the solution a system of structural constraints on power. And this is basically what our constitution is, a system of structural constraints on power. It’s making sure that nobody has too much power, that power is divided first between a national government as a government of delegated and enumerated and therefore limited powers. And states as governments of general jurisdiction exercising plenary authority, what we call in the common law tradition, police powers, protect public health, safety, and morals. But then also dividing within the national government, the powers of an executive who’s independent of the legislative, which has its own powers, which is independent of the judicial, which has its own powers. Well, we call that our separation of power system. The whole plan taken together is structural constraints on power. So nobody has too much. Everybody who has power is checked by somebody else with some power, and power is rendered accountable. Really, it’s about accountability. What the worry is, what the danger is, is unaccountable power. Whether it’s in the hands of one person or in the hands of a small group of people, or even in the hands of the demos, the people as a whole. Unaccountable power produces bad stuff.
Robert George: Disasters, catastrophes, tyranny. So how do we preserve liberty and prevent tyranny? How do we avoid a homegrown version of what we overthrew under the king? We do it with a system of constitutional structural constraints on power.
Rafael Mangual: And that’s such an important insight because I think when a lot of people who haven’t really given much thought to the Constitution and its importance and its role in American life, the sort of first thing that they point to about the Constitution are the rights that it grants people.
Robert George: Right. Which were only added as a set of amendments afterward, as a kind of set of suspenders to add to the belt.
Rafael Mangual: Right, right. And one of my favorite quotes from Justice Scalia, which I won’t try to deliver verbatim because I’ll butcher it, but he made the point during his confirmation hearing that every banana republic in the world has a constitution that grants rights. What makes America different, what makes America work, which allowed us to persevere through 250 years almost now, is that the structural constraints that you were just talking about.
Robert George: Well, exactly right. I knew Justice Scalia very, very well. We were close friends. And he used to have a pocket copy of the Constitution. He would reach into his pocket and there’d be the American Constitution. And in the other pocket, he would carry around a copy of the Constitution of the Soviet Union.
Robert George: And he’d pull out that, when he was speaking to groups, to make the point you’re making, he’d pull out that copy of the Soviet Constitution and he’d begin reading from the list of rights, their bill of rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, due process of law. Sounds great. On paper, those are wonderful freedoms, but they were mere, to use the words of our founders, parchment guarantees. They were meaningless. They were meaningless against the actual gangster Soviet regime, against that oligarchy. No, the real protection against the abuse of power is not so much in a judicially enforceable Bill of Rights as it is, and this was Scalia’s point, of course, in limitations on power. That’s why Madison, I believe it was Madison, says in the Federalist Papers that for all intents and purposes, the Constitution itself, this is before we added the Bill of Rights, is a Bill of Rights. He argued initially against adding a Bill of Rights because the Constitution itself, the unamended Constitution, is for all intents and purposes a Bill of Rights. And he was absolutely right about that.
Rafael Mangual: Right. Yeah. No, I do think that there’s kind of an interesting debate that’s been going on in the right legal circles for a long time, certainly characterized my years of law school, which was that there’s some people on the right who believe that all the rights articulated in the Bill of Rights are all the rights that you have. It’s not in the Constitution, you don’t have a right to it. And yet we have the other view, which is that, no, no, there are rights that are unarticulated. And the question to that argument is always, well, what’s the limiting principle? And the limiting principle is the limits on government.
Robert George: Exactly right. Limitations on governmental power. We have a Ninth Amendment that had to be added because we added the Bill of Rights, which seems then to send a message that the real limitations on government powers are not those structural limitations of the Constitution. This is why Madison initially opposed a Bill of Rights. Rather, they’re the rights that are articulated in the Bill of Rights. Well, now Madison says, how do we solve the problem of people forgetting about the strictures of the constitutional structural constraints? And we do it by adding a ninth and 10th amendment. The ninth saying the enumeration of certain rights in this constitution shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people. And then the 10th saying that any powers not hearing granted to the national government are reserved to the states and the people respectively. So there’s an effort and Madisonian effort to try to ensure that even when we added the Bill of Rights, we didn’t throw over or render meaningless the structural constraints of the Constitution. Those remain the true bulwarks of liberty.
Rafael Mangual: If there is one thing that I could get people to understand about the Constitution, it’s that this idea that you actually have a right to the government operating within its limits.
Robert George: Oh, precisely right. That is exactly right. Now, when we say the government, we mean the governments. So the national government only has the powers delegated to it. It seems to have forgotten that.
Robert George: And too often we, the people have forgotten that. So we let the national government exercise powers that they have not been granted and that’s bad. And then there’s also the states, governments of general jurisdiction. Now, they have plenary authority, but the Constitution does prohibit to them certain powers. And just elementary example, the power to convert titles of nobility, the power to enact ex post facto laws and so forth. But the real protections of liberty, the real protections against tyranny are those structural constraints. Our problem is we don’t honor them. We don’t hold our government to them. We’ve allowed government to grow beyond them, to usurp the authority of the people themselves, to override the structural constraints, and that’s perilous.
Rafael Mangual: And in some cases, we’ve allowed elements of the government to surrender their own powers to be exercised by other branches.
Robert George: Oh, the abdication of powers by the Congress to, on the one side, the executive, and on the other side, the courts is a scandal. I often tell my students, the most neglected word, the most forgotten word in the entire Constitution is the very first word of the very first and only sentence, of the very first article of the Constitution. Remember, the Constitution begins with the preamble, “We the people in order to form a more perfect union…” so forth and so on. The preamble tells us what they’re about to do. And then Article one begins doing it. Then we have Article two, Article three, and so on. Well, when they get down to business and Article one actually doing it, what’s the very first word of the one and only sentence?
Rafael Mangual: I’m going to fail this quiz.
Robert George: It’s the word “all.” “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States consisting of a Senate and a House of Representatives.” Now let you know a little secret, Raphael. “All” meant back there in the 19th century, late or late 18th century. 18th century. Late 18th century. The word all meant what it means today. It doesn’t mean some. It doesn’t mean many. It doesn’t mean a lot. It means all.
Robert George: And yet if you look at how we are governed today, if we look at the actual situation we Americans are in when it comes to the rules governing our lives, our businesses, our interactions, can we honestly say that those rules, those laws, that legislation is the product of Congress? Right? I mean, so much of it is the product of the executive branch and its agencies, so much as the product of courts just manufacturing law, when judges in theory are supposed to be interpreting and applying the law to disputed cases, not actually making the law. But I’m old fashioned. I’m old school. When I see the word “all,” I think they mean “all.” So Congress should be legislating. The executives should not be legislating, not by executive orders, not by signing statements, not by agency. And the courts should not be legislating.
And it’s not just that the courts and the executive have stolen power from the Congress at the federal level. That’s bad enough. The greater problem than that is that Congress has abdicated its authority because congressmen don’t want to make hard decisions, take politically perilous votes, take responsibility, be accountable. I blame Congress every bit as much as I blame the long string of Democratic and Republican presidents who have stolen power. The same with the courts.
Rafael Mangual: That’s exactly the right point. When my first couple of years here at the Manhattan Institute, we had an event at which Richard Epstein was speaking and he made the point that our government was designed for ambition to counteract ambition.
Robert George: That’s what it says in Federalist Number 10. Exactly right.
Rafael Mangual: And yet we’ve ended up with a system in which lethargy is counteracting lethargy.
Robert George: That’s a good point by Professor Epstein. He’s a brilliant man and that’s an excellent point.
Rafael Mangual: He is. But I do think it is shocking to people sometimes when they realize how far away from that ideal that we’ve gotten. But there’s a word that’s come up a few times already in this conversation, which is “liberty.” And it has been a concept that, to my mind, has always kind of informed the modern conservative movement. We are primarily concerned with human liberty and preserving it and making sure that it can be exercised in a way that is beneficial. And yet I think that there is a very strong disagreement on the right today about the role that liberty plays. You have this kind of divide between conservatives and libertarians where conservatives are kind of thought of as the anti-liberty folks, the people who are willing to constrain liberty to too high a degree. That’s never sat well with me because I’ve kind of always identified as a conservative and not necessarily a libertarian. I mean, what’s your view of that? Where does the modern conservative fall in this argument about the proper scope of individual liberty?
Robert George: There’s an important libertarian component to, I think, sound conservatism. There’s an important libertarian impulse. It’s far from the whole story, but it’s an important part of the story. And I commend my libertarian friends for their zealous advocacy and defense of that element of the larger conservative picture. But conservatism isn’t reducible to libertarianism. And conservatives have a range of values that they seek to conserve, including liberty. One of those values, perhaps the most fundamental of all our American values, is the value of equality rightly understood, not equality of outcomes, not equality of wealth, not a quality of opportunity, but equality before the law, very crucial. Every conservative should be zealous in his defense of that. And that equality in turn reflects, it’s a kind of implication of a deeper and more important and fundamental equality. And that is the principle of the equal dignity, the profound inherent and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. We human beings, as our founders recognized, are unequal in many, many ways. We’re unequal in strength. We’re unequal in talent. We’re unequal in intelligence. We’re unequal in charm. We’re unequal in status. We’re unequal in beauty. We’re unequal in so many ways. And those things matter. Those inequalities matter. I mean, it’s okay.
Rafael Mangual: I’ll never play in the NBA.
Robert George: I don’t play in the NFL. Yeah, there’s legitimate inequality. But when it comes to our fundamental worth and dignity, how we count in the moral equation, our government’s duty to treat us with what the liberal philosopher Ronald Dworkin called “equal concern and respect,” although I think he stumbled on the implications of that, but the principle is sound, that is fundamental. The profound, inherent and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family is, in my opinion, the ur-principle of all sound morality and the most fundamental thing for us to conserve. In fact, our due regard, our true regard, our sound regard for liberty flows out of that principle. People need liberty in order to realize the goods that are their own fulfillment, that are the key constitutive aspects of their own fulfillment. It’s because they have that dignity, that inherent and equal dignity that we’re concerned about liberty.
But it’s very important that we don’t misunderstand liberty, Raphael. Here the founders were great. Madison, Washington, the whole gang, they understood the difference between liberty and license. Right. License is doing what you want, whenever you want, with whoever you want, whatever you want, wherever you want, just because you want to. Right. The goal there is just satisfying desires. That’s not liberty in the founders’ sense. That’s not liberty in the historic sense. It’s not liberty in the highest and best sense. The honorable liberties, the true liberty, liberties that are not licensed are those that we enjoy because they’re necessary for our realization of those aspects of human wellbeing and fulfillment that are so fundamental to ourselves as human beings. So I think it’s important for us in the conservative camp to be the champions of honorable liberty, of true liberty, and to insist on the distinction between liberty and license. I think we also have to be the true champions of true equality, not equality of outcome, not equality of wealth, but equality before the law, and even more fundamentally equal dignity.
Rafael Mangual: Talk to us a little bit more about that because I do think that this debate about what equality we should be pursuing is kind of one of the key political debates of our time. And the conception of liberty that you just articulated, I think is exactly right. I mean, you cannot be fully human if you are not free to experience the consequences of the choices that you made. And I think that there is a sort of part of the American left and some parts of the American right who want to constrain liberty out of a sense of sort of fear, I guess, is really the emotion that I would tie it to. If I am free to fail, then there’s no safety net, and therefore we should sort of constrain liberty to the point that failure isn’t really a true option. And that is kind of rooted in an idea that there’s something inherently wrong about a society in which you can have such disparate outcomes between and among the people who are living within it. What do we make of that?
Robert George: Well, sometimes it’s said that there’s an inherent conflict, or at least a profound tension between liberty and equality, and you are a liberal as opposed to a conservative, depending on which you think wins in the contest between the two. If you favor equality over liberty in this conflict, then that makes you a person of the left. It makes you a liberal or a socialist or a person on the left. If you favor liberty over equality, then that makes you a person of the right, that makes you a conservative. Some libertarians will talk this way, as will some Marxists. They’re talking the same language there. And I think they’re both mistake because I don’t think that there is any conflict and not any fundamental tension between liberty and equality when we understand liberty in its highest and best sense in its true sense where it’s not license. And if we understand equality not as equal wealth, equal outcomes, but as equality before the law, equality of opportunity, most fundamentally the profound inherent and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family, then the apparent conflict goes away. It’s shown to be merely apparent and not real. So I don’t set up the political-theoretical discussion as a question of whether we favor liberty over equality or equality over liberty. Both are very important values and conservatives, and in my mind, all Americans should be champions of both liberty properly understood and equality properly understood.
Rafael Mangual: You are professor of jurisprudence. So before I move on from the topic of the Constitution and the foundings, I do want to ask you for what your most sort of controversial opinion is about the law, namely focusing on cases that were wrongly decided. I remember hearing audible gasps when I was in my criminal law class when I argued that Katz was wrongly decided, this idea of the reasonable expectation of privacy, which I can’t find anywhere in the Constitution, and that made me very unpopular. But I think people are always curious about people like you and what your sort of controversial hot takes are on jurisprudence.
Robert George: Well, this may come across as dodging your question, but in the spirit of the question anyway, it’s not so much a decision I think was wrong, but where I sometimes shock my own students is by giving the credit I think it’s due as a great opinion making powerful and profound points, albeit at the end of the day on the wrong side, is Justice Frankfurter’s dissent in the second flag salute case during World War II. This was the case of West Virginia v. Barnette that overturned a case from just two or three years earlier called Minersville School District against Gobitis in which Frankfurter had been the author of the opinion, which I believe was unanimous. If not unanimous, it was eight to one. It was an overwhelming victory. But the court in just two, three years reversed itself putting Frankfurter in the minority because he didn’t reverse himself. And this was a case that involved Jehovah’s Witness families whose children were in public school. And first case was in Minersville, Pennsylvania, second case was in West Virginia. And the schools introduced mandatory pledge of allegiance ceremonies, flag salutes. And from the perspective, the distinctive religious perspective of this particular religious group, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it was impermissible to participate in this ceremony and to say the pledge because they perceived it as a violation of the Bible’s command against worshiping graven images. Now, most Americans of most faiths don’t see that as a form of idol worship, but the Jehovah’s Witnesses in good faith did. I mean, it was their religion’s teaching. So they wanted their children to be exempted from the flag salute, but the school officials or the school boards or the state in the case of West Virginia did not want to exempt the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ children.
So the case came up the first time and the court ruled in favor of the schools, said, “No, the schools have the right to impose the requirement that the kids say the pledge of allegiance.” If the kids wouldn’t say the pledge of allegiance, the schools have the right to impose a discipline on them, including throwing them out of school, which is what in fact happened. They were excluded from the public school. Then two or three years later, the court reversed itself. I could go into the reasons why they reversed themselves, but they’re not critical to the point I’m trying to make here. With Frankfurter in the dissent. Now, Frankfurter begins that dissent. It’s a magnificently written dissent. I mean, it’s one of the great literary works of jurisprudence. He begins by saying, “As a member of the most vilified minority in human history,” being Jewish, “a member of the most vilified minority human history, I am scarcely insensible to the claims of liberty,” which basically the claim being made by the Jehovah’s Witnesses says, “but nevertheless, we as judges must not usurp the authority of the elected representatives of the people as to what the requirements of the public good are.” He makes clear that if it were up to him in a legislative role, he would gladly grant an exemption to these children because of their religious faith. But he notes that I’m a judge. I’m not a legislator. It’s not up to me. If I disagree with the legislation, that doesn’t mean the legislation’s unconstitutional. It means I have a different political perspective on the question. It’s up to the people acting through their elected representatives to decide the question, even if they decide it in a way that I think is wrong. And I quote at great length in my classes. I make my students listen to it. They’re supposed to have read it, but I go through very slowly the points he makes about how the judicial usurpation of legislative authority infantilizes the people politically. It takes their responsibility to be the guardians of their own liberties away from them, rendering them what? Very poor guardians of their own liberty, utterly dependent on some elite class, some aristocracy in black robes. It’s a very ... Now, at the end of the day, I would’ve voted with the majority in the second case, not with the dissent, but it’s a powerful dissent. The points he makes are true. I don’t think they quite warrant the ultimate inference he wants to draw that the state should win and the Jehovah’s Witnesses should lose, but it’s very powerful.
Rafael Mangual: And predictive, right? Absolutely. I can’t think of ... I think the last time where the Supreme Court has made a decision that ultimately put an issue back in the hands of the public through their elected representatives, where action was taken promptly in response is RFRA.
Rafael Mangual: In Employment Division v. Smith, which was in 1991?
Robert George: Early to mid ‘90s. I don’t remember the exact year.That’s right. Yeah.
Rafael Mangual: So almost an entire generation
Robert George: After the Smith case. That’s right.
Rafael Mangual: And yet that is the last time that we can recall American society sort of taking that back. So I think he was absolutely onto something even if he was wrong about the free speech issue.
Robert George: Actually, that’s why my students know, why I make them listen, because he is onto something there. Ultimately, we cannot rely on courts to be the guardians of our liberties. They do have a role, but the role’s not to be, I think he used the term “school marm,” not to be a school marm. We ourselves have to be the guardians of our own liberties. We have to be wise and judicious and sensitive to the legitimate claims of true liberty in our legislation, in our activity as citizens, in who we vote for and who we vote against.
Rafael Mangual: Right. There’s a responsibility that comes with citizenship.
Robert George: Exactly right. And this I think is being lost.
Rafael Mangual: Right. I’m listening to you speak and I’m just wishing that I had done well enough in high school to end up in one of your classes. But it makes me think, because you have spent decades now embedded in a kind of institution that has drawn the ire of American conservatives, particularly in recent years, namely the university. And I think there are a few people who would argue that you are the model professor in terms of exposing your students, not just to the views that you hold, but to the views that other people hold. I mean, you just articulated a great example, right?
Robert George: No, I mean, to me, my job, my vocation, my mission as a teacher is to empower my students to form themselves to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. Now to do that, I can’t indoctrinate my students. If I indoctrinate my students, I have not made them determine truth seekers, much less courageous truth speakers. I’ve made them ideologues or dogmatists. I mean, indoctrination is not only not education, it’s the very antithesis of education. I’d much rather my students be ignorant than that they’d be indoctrinated. If they’re ignorant, maybe I can teach them something. If they’re indoctrinated, then before I can ever even get to the point where I might be able to teach them something, I have to pry their minds open with a crowbar. And that’s really difficult for us human beings. Once you’ve actually gotten yourself locked into ideology, you’re deeply emotionally invested in a dogma, it’s a hard business.
So if I’m to fulfill my mission, if I’m to help my students to form themselves to be determined truth seekers and courageous true speakers, then I’ve got to expose them. I’ve got to confront them with the very best that has been thought and said, not just by people on my side of a question, but by the best arguments, the best thinkers living and dead on all sides of the questions. That’s why in my courses, I mean, I assign Marxists like Herbert Marcuse. I assign libertarians like Professor Epstein. I assign old-fashioned traditional conservatives like Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, people like that. They don’t get a party line in my class. Now my students all happen to know what I think because I’m a pretty public person. They’re aware, but they also know that you don’t get a good grade from me by parroting back to me what they’ve read on the internet, I believe, even if they’re right. And I do believe that. And that’s because it’s just not my job to get them to think like me.
Rafael Mangual: I think there’s a very widely held sense that that’s what makes people like you unique in university settings. I think a lot of Americans, students, former students, and just observers from the outside have come to a belief that universities have essentially been captured for the purpose of indoctrination.
Robert George: Too much of it goes on. Way too much of it goes on. Now, I have had people on the left say, “I’m a hypocrite.” They say, “Well, you claim not to indoctrinate your students, but an awful lot of your students come out of your classes being conservatives and going on to be prominent conservatives and things like that. “ And I do know that minds are changed in my classes. And it’s probably true that many more people enter my classes as liberals who then become conservatives than the other way around, conservatives have become liberals. But honestly…
Rafael Mangual: Well, it’s because you’re right.
Robert George: Well, it’s not just because I’m right. Here’s the thing, most of the students who enter my classroom have never actually heard the arguments for conservative points of view. They’ve adopted their liberal perspectives just from the ambient environment, what people in their communities or families think, what they think smart people think, what they think people who read the New York Times and are therefore smart people think, but they have no idea why conservatives think the way they do.
(: They just have a caricature understanding. Well, now they’re in my class and now they’re reading, say, Edmund Burke or Russell Kirk or Eric Voegelin and they say, “Oh, wait a minute.” It’s compelling. It’s pretty compelling. And a certain number of students, certain percentage of students end up being conservatives who had come from liberal backgrounds. But I think a fundamental problem right now is that so many of our young people grow up in a bubble, in a kind of monoculture, an intellectual monoculture, a political monoculture. And so they haven’t, until they get to some professor like me, there are lots of other professors like me, but until they get to somebody like me, they haven’t heard the arguments for the other side. They’re very much like ... I mean, this is not meant to be a criticism or deprecate in any way the Amish. I love the Amish, but a lot of my liberal students are like the liberal equivalent Amish people. They’ve grown up in a very tight community, very insular community.
Rafael Mangual: And the Amish get Rumspringa and you get sent out every once in a while to experience the world.
Robert George: Yeah, that’s right. To experience the broader world and decide whether they want to remain with the Amish. And a lot of our liberal kids, until they got to get to my classroom, haven’t actually had that option.
Rafael Mangual: University equivalent of Rumspringa then. No, I think you’re exactly right. I mean, I think back to my own educational experience, I exposed myself to conservatism almost on accident. I went to the City University of New York, which has been captured by the left for a very, very long time. And I just remember hearing political dialogue in my classes and something sat not quite well with me, but I couldn’t articulate why. I didn’t grow up in a political family. I wasn’t a particularly good student in high school, so I didn’t do much reading on my own. It really wasn’t until I had an experience in which I felt like, hey, I should be able to sort of keep up with my peers intellectually, that I went home and started looking for things to read. I felt stupid.
Rafael Mangual: But I’ll tell you what, that was how I came across places like City Journal and the Manhattan Institute and thinkers like Mill and Locke and Burke and Buckley and Sowell. And it really turned me off of my educational experience. I became sort of angry about the fact that here I was paying money to be educated and yet all the most interesting and thoughtful things that I was reading, I was finding on my own and had never heard in a classroom essentially, really until I got to law school was sort of the first time. And even then, I think I had one conservative professor and a couple of liberal professors who did a good job of talking about the conservative point of view. And that leads me to this question of what to do about it. And I think that there are a lot of people on the right who have kind of written universities off, said, “They’re lost. Professor George, you’re amazing, but you are a needle in a haystack at this point. You’re outnumbered 600 to one. It’s time to scrap these things and start anew.” You have some people like Jordan Peterson who are starting their own online kind of universities with Peterson Academy. There are all these ideas. All of them have kind of reflected this notion that the university has lost. I suspect you disagree with that and I want to get your…
Robert George: Well, I mean, if you tell me that I’m outnumbered 600 to one, my immediate impulse is to say, great chart. Let’s bring on the argument. Yeah. I mean, let’s bring on the argument. I mean, it only takes one to expose students who are within earshot of a competing point of view. I suppose many universities won’t allow there to be two conservatives because if you had two, we’d have them surrounded. No, I’m also excited because there are things happening in universities now that are very positive. There’s a lot of bad stuff. No question. There’s way too much indoctrination. There’s too much of a monoculture, too much of a bubble. All that’s true. But gosh, look at the rise of the civics programs, the so-called civic centers all over the country. Programs modeled in many cases on my program at Princeton, the James Madison Program, which now it’s in its 25th year at Princeton. And it’s a large program. We have just about 350 undergraduate fellows of the program. Now they’re outstanding. Some of the best students in the university. Every year I look forward to the honors results and elections to the great honor societies and the winning of the scholarships and so forth. And our students are massively overrepresented among the highest achievers. But that began back in 2000. So we’ve gone for more than 25 years now. And these programs modeled on us have now popped up all over the country and some of them on a much larger scale, especially in the state universities. They’re really promising civics programs and schools of civic leadership at Arizona State, University of Texas at Austin, University of Florida, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, University of South Carolina, University of Tennessee, the Ohio State University. Georgia looks like it’s going to create one at Georgia Tech and one at University of Georgia. And the big news is that the University of Michigan has announced that it’s creating one and has made an initial commitment of $50 million to create a civics program. And the avowed purposes of these programs, among others, is to enhance the viewpoint diversity, the range of perspectives available. So they’re not supposed to be conservative indoctrination centers.
And I would be the first one to be really disappointed if they went down that road, but they are meant to broaden the discussion, make sure there are many, many more points of view represented in the discussion. And they’re flying, especially at these flagship state universities. But there are also important programs at Harvard, Tyler VanderWeele, Professor Tyler VanderWeele’s program in human flourishing, at University of Pennsylvania, Jesus Fernández-Villaverde’s program in free markets, the University of Chicago, Professor Candace Vogler’s program in moral philosophy. And on and on, Johns Hopkins has now got a great new program in its Washington, D.C. campus, civics program under Professor Bill Howell. They took him from the University of Chicago, a conservative political scientist. There’s some great stuff, exciting stuff happening. I mean, reform is going on.
Rafael Mangual: So we shouldn’t lose hope.
Robert George: Absolutely no reason to lose hope. My goodness, not now. This is not the moment.
Robert George: Maybe during a high woke, if in 2023 or 2024, if somebody said, “Abandon hope all who enter here.” I wouldn’t have gone along with it, but I would’ve understood it.
Robert George: Now we’re in 2026 and the world looks very different and I don’t understand it anymore. Just look out there and see what’s happening. Now, I suppose that there are some people who will say, “Oh, you know what? These reforms are actually a bad thing. These civics programs are actually a bad thing. All these new programs and institutes and schools at other universities around the country are a bad thing because they will give the university, which is fundamentally corrupt, a patina of legitimacy and will impede what should be our effort to burn it all down.” I just think that is a terrible mistake. We don’t need to burn it all down. We need to reform it. We certainly don’t need to be indoctrinating students in the conservative point of view. We need to be forming the young men and women entrusted to our chart to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. They’ll end up where they end up. I’m pretty confident that a lot of them are going to end up in a place I really like, but it shouldn’t be because I’m indoctrinating them or anybody else is indoctrinating them. It’s because they’re thinking deeply, critically, which always includes self-critically and for themselves.
Rafael Mangual: You’ve kind of anticipated where I was going to go with my next and final question for you, which is, as a university professor, you have a sort of unique access to a segment of the population that I think a lot of people have been worried about, and that is young men. You are in a position where you could be a role model, where you can be sort of a guidance counselor of sorts for men who are trying to find their way to maturity. There is a sense that young men have kind of been both formally and informally castigated by broader society, and as a result, they have kind of pulled back and fallen into the trap of the sort of chauvinistic manosphere and the Andrew Tates of the world and that sort of thing.
Robert George: Very dark stuff. Very dark.
Rafael Mangual: And I share that concern and sense of angst about that. And I was wondering, someone with your experience, with your wisdom, I mean, how do you think about that responsibility?
Robert George: Yeah. Well, I’m not speaking here about any particular individual. Individual or individuals, there’s a wide variability, but we can look in broad categories and see where different categories of people are. There are some very serious problems with our young women today, and they’re especially egregious in the case of young liberal secular women. Rates of depression, anxiety, all sorts of problems are out of control when it comes to young women, especially young women who are not in religious communities and who are progressive or liberal in their political beliefs. That’s just a fact. That’s the way it is. Young women who are conservative are doing pretty well. In fact, they are the stars of the show just at the moment. Because young men, including conservative young men, are not doing very well. It’s not so much the problems with depression and anxiety, although that’s present in the male population as well as the female population. Anybody who’s been on campus or knows anything about counseling resources and their use on campus knows about this. But a lot of our young men are in danger of falling into dark ideologies, including dark ideologies of the right. This is the Andrew Tate phenomenon, the Nick Fuentes phenomenon.
I have been shocked, I have to tell you for sure. I know I’m an old guy, but I have been shocked to see the revival of antisemitism among young men, including conservative young men, including religious young men. I’m Catholic, young Catholic men. It’s not the majority, anything approaching it. It’s still a small minority, not quite marginal. A year ago, I would’ve said marginal. Now it’s not quite marginal. You just look at who’s listening to whom and stuff that’s said in chat rooms that gets exposed and so forth. I never would’ve imagined in 2026 we would see this, but we are seeing it. I’m not seeing that among young conservative women. I’m sure there, again, individuals, there are exceptional cases and so forth. But if we look at group, look at groups right now, look in group categories right now, I’m seeing, hey, you know what? The young conservative women have it together.
Robert George: They really have it together. One of my students works here at the Manhattan Institute, Danielle Shapiro, is a very good example of this. And I have so many, many more. And of course, I’ve got some great young conservative men as well. And there are students on the liberal side, both male and female in my classes who are doing fine, who are doing great. But speaking again, in terms of broad categories, we have a real problem on the female side, especially with progressive, secular women. We’re starting to have a serious problem on the men’s side, not just with liberal men, but also in a different way with conservative men.
What’s happened in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk has been exactly what I feared might begin to happen. A radicalization, a kind of right-wing authoritarian radicalization of our conservative young men. Many drew the inference that, well, look, Charlie tried to reason with people. He tried to do it by way of in a discussion. They killed him. That doesn’t work. We need other means. And they’ve fallen down a rattle into racism, into antisemitism. This is not us as conservatives. Antisemitism is not us. Racism is not us. Goes back to that point I made at the beginning. The ur-principle of morale, what we should be conserving above all else as conservatives is the principle of the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. And that is simply incompatible with antisemitism, with racism, any of these bigoted attitudes and perspectives. So we’ve got a challenge, but I think we on the conservative side can meet it. I hope the folks on the progressive side can meet their challenge as well. I’m confident that we can meet it, but it’s not going to take care of itself. Our young men, especially, need role models. They need people they look up to modeling the kinds of attitudes and behaviors that we want to see, attitudes and behaviors that hold up, that valorize the best in our tradition, conserving the principles of the American founding, principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, the basic Judeo-Christian ethic founded on that principle of profound inherent and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. That’s what our young men need, and it’s up to us to provide them with that.
Rafael Mangual: Well, I can’t think of anyone more up to the task than you, sir. Thank you so much for taking the time. Great pleasure. Thank you. I think this was incredible. I hope you all who are watching, listening, enjoyed it as much as I did. Please do not forget to like, comment, subscribe, shoot us a note, tell us what you liked, what you didn’t like, share this with your friends so that we can continue to have great, amazing guests like the great one and only Robert George. Thank you so much.
Robert George: Thank you, Rafael.
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