[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “I think race is a very emotional issue with black America, and it can be very easily manipulated. And it has been manipulated for decades by people who use it to direct blacks to vote in a certain way.”

In this latest episode in our special series on the U.S. presidential transition, I sit down with Bob Woodson and Joshua Mitchell. Woodson is a civil rights activist and the Founder and President of the Woodson Center. Mitchell is a professor of political theory at Georgetown University.

“The partisan debate on race is driven by guilty whites who are seeking absolution from crimes they never committed, and entitled blacks who are seeking absolution from injustices they never suffered,” says Woodson.

What does Trump’s victory mean for black America? Will Trump be the first post-racial president? And what is the role of mediating institutions and what Woodson and Mitchell call “invisible knowledge” in revitalizing American communities?

“We have levels of despair and depression because the state has become this administrative behemoth, making citizen competence impossible,” says Mitchell. “We’ve got this invitation, literally, to return to the founders’ vision, where we have citizen competence. The only way you can have small government is if you have massive citizen competence.”

“The biggest challenge we’re facing is a moral and spiritual free-fall that is consuming people of all races and all colors,” says Woodson. “But we’re not going to be able to find the source of this solution if we are separated by race, and that’s why we must become post-racial.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Bob Woodson:
Pleased to be here.

Joshua Mitchell:
Glad to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:
Bob, as someone who is involved in the civil rights movement and a self-proclaimed radical pragmatist, what happened with the black vote this time around?

Mr. Woodson:
I think what you witness is liberation. I think race is a very emotional issue with black America, and it can be very easily manipulated. decades by people who use it to direct blacks to vote in a certain way. But I think over time it’s matured to the point where people are more concerned about their public personal safety and how much money they have in their pockets over what someone’s race is. I think you saw maturity there. They became radical pragmatists and refused to allow race to dominate their decision.

Mr. Jekielek:
Josh, are we seeing a post-racial movement here?

Mr. Mitchell:
I would add to what Bob is saying. Black America has been, to put the matter baldly, the plaything of the state for a very, very long time. And I think since the 1960s, the expectation would be the Democratic Party would deliver. And since identity politics came to the fore, the idea the Democratic Party had, I think, was that there would be this vast alliance of people of color who would be known as the innocent victims and that this political coalition would come to predominate.
But as Bob said, Americans, black and white, are pre-eminently practical people. And they, I think, a large number of so-called people of color woke up and realized it won’t do simply to take the identity politics label, the innocent victimhood label, when in fact their bank accounts are faltering, when they don’t have security. So I think we’ve reached a cultural moment where identity politics is at least for the moment vanquished, and we have a whole new opportunity here.

In one sense, blacks have lived in a banana republic for the last 50 years. I mean all of the cities where there’s major decline that has occurred over the past 50 years have all been run by liberal democratic administrations. So if partisan politics alone were the source of salvation, the question is why are we witnessing all of this decline over the past 50 years?

I was born during the depression in a low-income black neighborhood in South Philadelphia. There were no middle-class people there. But 96% of all households had a man and a woman raising children. Elderly people could walk safely without fear of being assaulted by their grandchildren. Never heard of gunfire. Children were not shot in their cribs. It was unheard of. We have the highest circumstance of low-income blacks. Ask yourself, how were we able to achieve in the face of these circumstances, the great promise of the civil rights movement? Political participation was, if you vote for us, these conditions will improve.

Now, the blacks are waking up to that reality and beginning to migrate towards becoming swing voters. I don’t think they’re moving to become Republicans. I think they’re moving more towards becoming swing voters. Politicians are going to have to earn their vote. Yes, they have agreed to become competitive. And that’s wholesome for the country. And it’s in the best interest of the black community to be competitive.

Mr. Jekielek:
Josh, what do you think the opportunity is here?

Mr. Mitchell:
America is first and foremost a middle class commercial republic, and we have to get back to building things. And so I don’t know that it’s going to be easy. I think there are huge challenges to moving away from globalism toward a middle class commercial republic. But what we have to do is to recognize that the people who are working with their hands, and this is not only whites, but blacks and Hispanics and all the rest, have to be given an opportunity. Our state craftsmen have to be thinking about how they can make sure that this group thrives from here on in. Instead of thinking about global capital, we have to start thinking about the people who are living everyday lives among us.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is a middle class commercial republic?

Mr. Mitchell:
There’s only one philosophical tradition in America that’s ever developed, and it’s called pragmatism. Why? Because Americans, unlike Europeans who are involved in very high level theoretical debates, which led to the disasters of socialism and national socialism, Americans have always been practical people. The disease of the last 20 years, at least, has been that we’ve been asked to think ideologically. Are you pure? Are you stained?

Now, we have put all that away. We have to become a truly post-racial society. Of course, the word on the street was that Obama was the first post-racial president. It will probably be Trump who’s the first post-racial president. So we have to be moving in that direction.

Mr. Woodson:
I think President Obama was in the position to be the first post-racial president. But as soon as he came out in that speech at Morehouse University, where he prodded young men to step up and be fathers, he was castigated by the civil rights leadership. He retreated from that and never spoke about personal responsibility again. He eventually devolved with the Trayvon Martin situation by saying, Trayvon Martin could have been my son.
That was a death knell to ending racial polarization in America. He became a racial president from that moment on. It’s ironic that President-elect Trump attracted 30% of black independent men and the largest number of Hispanics because he spoke to the practical needs of people. That’s why I think he is the first post-racial president. He’s not a guilty white person, which to me is refreshing.

Mr. Jekielek:
What do you mean, not a guilty white person?

Mr. Woodson:
My young colleague Delano Squires framed it. He said a lot of this partisan debate on race is driven by guilty whites who are seeking absolutions from crimes they never committed and entitled blacks who are seeking absolute absolution from injustices they never suffered. Like the biggest challenge that we’re facing is a class phenomenon from both the left and the right. You have racial grievance merchants.

The civil rights movement has morphed into a race grievance industry. 70% of all these 22 trillion that we’ve spent in the past 50 years on poverty programs, 70% of it goes to middle class people, black, white, who are providing services to the poor. We’ve created a commodity out of poor people, and we wonder why we fail. They ask which problems are fundable, not which problems are solvable.

At this point, any group’s participation in the American economy isn’t what government does for them. It’s their small business formation rates. In a healthy economy, only 3% of Americans are entrepreneurs, but they generate 70% of the jobs. And entrepreneurs tend to be C students,
not A students, according to David Birch’s study at MIT. Grade A students come back to universities, and grade C students endow. Whenever I say this to business groups, they laugh. I once gave a talk in Miami and they said, this guy was the last person in our law class and he can buy all of us.

Mr. Mitchell:
Identity politics is built on guilt. And I think part of the reason why there has been such an unpredictable reaction to Trump, Russia collusion, all this stuff, he’s literally, the way I put it in print, is the wrong kind of white man. If you’re a white man, you have to be guilty. You have to defend every innocent victimhood cause, and if you don’t you’re considered toxic. The Joe Biden and Walz the Democrat model of a male is this guilty white male. Trump literally cannot exist in that world. This is why you have to invent a demonic source that brings him forth like Russia.

The victory of Trump is a cultural declaration that America is done looking at people as if they’re guilty or innocent victims. It does nobody any good. We have a generation of men, black and white, who are told that they need to recede, and they are receding with drugs and violence and pornography and video games. We need to bring them back. It cannot be the case that the future is female and so I have two sons. It cannot be the case that all of us who have sons and grandsons have to tell them that they need to step aside. We need to build a regime based on competence, full stop, and give everybody an opportunity to develop along those lines.

What’s so wondrous about Bob’s groups is that they’re not interested in talking about guilt and innocence. They are interested in demonstrating competence to themselves and to others around them, and they are looked up to by younger members of the community who are at risk. As one of Bob’s people, Julia, had said in one of our meetings, the reason why people succeed is they have somebody they don’t want to let down. And that person is a person of competence. And we have to stop thinking in terms of economic efficiency on the libertarian right. We have to stop thinking in terms of innocent victimhood on the left. And we have to focus singularly on developing the competence of our fellow citizens.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about your background, Bob, and the work you’ve done at the Woodson Center. Please give us a thumbnail of how you came into this.

Mr. Woodson:
I was born in South Philadelphia, the youngest of five children, to a mother with a fifth-grade education. My dad was a laborer, very strong. He got a job at a time when blacks did not drive trucks from the train to the dairies. He took the job and had to fight to keep it. They say you can have it, if you can keep it, but he was a very strong-willed guy. This was under Jim Crow in 1937 in the midst of the depression. He had some war-related wounds
He fought in the First World War with the Harlem Hellcats.

But he had some chronic problems that resulted in him dying when I was about nine, leaving my mother with five children to raise in this neighborhood. But again, it was secure. And so I had to rely upon my peers as an alternative family. And so I gained an appreciation for why kids join gangs. But I was blessed to be equipped with the kind of values where I chose good friends. There are three of us left today. They were a year older than me and they dropped, so they went into college and I was unaffiliated.

So I dropped out and went into the Air Force in 1954. I was in the space program and the Air Force saw things in me. So I went to college while I was in the Air Force to the University of Miami and got 12 credits, only I had to be taught on the base because I couldn’t walk on campus. I had 12 credits from University of Miami at a time and I could not walk on the campus. So I knew what racism was all about.

Long story short, after I got out, I worked my way through college, into a black college. Thank God it wasn’t affirmative action. That would have put me at UPenn. But I went to a small black college, Cheyney, where I got the kind of intellectual nurturing that I needed that prepared me for a full scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania.

I got involved in the civil rights movement, but became very disenchanted when I realized that people, that there was a bait-and-switch game going on where we used the demographics of poor blacks to promote remedies. And when funding came, it did not go to poor blacks. It went to middle-class providers. So I left the civil rights movement following the death of Dr. King and began to work on behalf of low-income people of all races.I have been singularly focused on serving the needs of the least of God’s children, which means that I have to be clear and constant in that commitment.

Therefore, I thought it was necessary to be humble, but also, in the words of Dr.. King, be open to self-criticism. Those are the principles that have guided my work so I have worked now on behalf of low-income people since the late 60s. I have worked on behalf of low-income people of all races. I work with Native Americans and take over Alcatraz. I work with Cesar Chavez and helped him acquire an affordable medical facility to help the farm workers. My work has been concentrating on the class issue, and that’s what’s missing today.

Mr. Jekielek:
You did it through this unique approach of going into communities that are disadvantaged, finding people that are succeeding, and empowering them.

Mr. Woodson:
For many years the name of my organization had the word enterprise in it. It was only changed to the Woodson Center for the past six years because my name is more associated with the principles than the enterprise. But the reason I selected it is because the same principles that work in the market economy work in the social economy. And so what the Woodson Center does, we go into low-income communities with sort of like a venture capitalist without capital.

We go into there and we look for social entrepreneurs, people who were in prison, people who had overcome tremendous odds in their lives. They were alcoholics. They were prostitutes. Through God’s grace, they became redeemed, and they used their redemptive qualities to influence others. And this is where Josh and I come together, because a lot of conservatives believe that the way you change people is to teach them. There’s a great reliance on intellectual white papers. And if we just have the right policies, then people’s practice will change.

I understood that values are not taught, they’re caught. Grassroots leaders are able to redeem and promote redemption and reform of individuals by actually modeling the kind of values that they want people to emulate. And as a consequence, I have been a party to the restoration of whole communities just based upon the enterprising work of three or four people. They’re able to affect hundreds.

The Woodson Center has been there to not only document it, but also provide access to capital. So two things that a venture capitalist brings to an enterprise, they bring capital, but they also bring managerial expertise because entrepreneurs are poor bookkeepers and grassroots people are poor bookkeepers. The Woodson Center provides training and also access to capital so they can take what works for 10 people and affect a thousand.

But the qualities that make these grassroots healing agents effective makes them invisible. And that’s because elitism prevents both conservatives and liberals looking to them, to untutored people, as a source of solution. That’s why I say there’s wisdom that is learned and wisdom that is earned. Grassroots people earn their wisdom and therefore what we as a society can benefit from them, but they’re ignored as a source of new insight.

And that’s why this administration is poised, is in a position to really harvest that knowledge and put these people to work healing this community, this society. If a mother who lost two sons in a toxic, violent neighborhood were able to forgive the people who committed these crimes and used, turned that pain into purpose and caused 20 other moms to find healing, perhaps they have something to teach a middle-class mother who lost a child to suicide.

The biggest challenge we’re facing is a moral and spiritual free fall that is consuming people of all races and all colors. But we’re not going to be able to find a source of this solution if we are separated by race. And that’s why we must become post-racial.

Mr. Mitchell:
The question is, what kind of knowledge does a democracy need to thrive? And there’s two choices. It’s either this invisible knowledge, this practical hands-on experience, or it’s intellectual policy knowledge. And the greatest mind, I think, of the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America, saw this very, very clearly. The Europeans, he said, are looking over the Atlantic and saying, these people have no philosophers, no great artists, no great literary figures. Tocqueville said, yes, but they have this invisible reservoir of practical experience, and that’s why they can build a democracy and Europe cannot.

Bob and I met in a think tank, which will go unnamed. We were listening to the presentation and he caught my eye, I caught his eye. I should say, I had just come back. I'd been in the Middle East for, I’m still with Georgetown, but took many years off and went to the Middle East to help build programs. Then I left Georgetown for two years and went to Iraq to help build the American University of Iraq in Kurdistan. And it was a winner-take-all political arrangement.

And I said to the students, we’re not going to do winner-take-all. There’s an orphanage down the road. They need help in learning English. And I’m going to force you to go down. And we’re going to do this thing called civic associations, mediating institutions. They looked at me and they said, what’s that? I realized then that the key to building a democracy is you must have this non-political space where people can demonstrate their competence and become leaders in their community.

When I came back and Bob and I were looking at each other across the table, I heard Bob talk and I said, this is a growing convergence left and right. After the Berlin Wall fell, people on the left and even people on the right began to see that the key to revitalizing America would be revitalizing the mediating institutions, the families, the churches, the local groups, etc.

Then after 9/11 everything was about consolidation of power at the level of the state. And we developed what could be the level of the state. And we developed what could be called the national security state. What we’re realizing now is that the cost of this, for 20-plus years is that people have become lonely, isolated, we’ve got depression rates that are through the roof, we’ve got citizens who think they only can look to the state to take care of them, and yet Bob’s groups show us that that, in fact, is not the case. And so we need to completely revitalize America.

The key is not another policy white paper. The key is going to be recognizing that what we need is already there. We just need to look for it and find it and support it. This is the way we go forward. It’s the corollary to rebuilding the middle class. We have to do what the DOGE people are saying, which is we have to cut back federal government spending. But the only way we can do that is if we have a compensating increase in
the social capital that Bob keeps talking about.

We have to find these local groups, these local people, everywhere in our community. This is not a national problem, this is a local problem. We need to find these people, we need to support them. The government can be a supplement to that effort but can’t be a substitute for that effort.

We’re at this remarkable moment when we’re talking about reducing federal spending, when we have levels of despair and depression because the state has become this administrative behemoth, making citizen competence impossible. We’ve got this invitation, literally, to return to the founder’s vision where we have citizen competence. The only way you can have small government is if you have massive citizen competence, and that’s developing this invisible knowledge, which Bob’s groups have been doing for four years.

Mr. Woodson:
There are two ways that you can prevent someone from competing. The first is by law. That’s what segregation is all about. But the second one is more insidious. It’s telling them you don’t have to compete. We‘ll take care of you. We’ll take care of you. Black America, listen, you don’t have to compete. After all, the legacy of slavery, if you’re having babies out of wedlock and destroying each other. And therefore, whites are responsible for your condition. Unless they change, there’s little you can expect to do. That’s the narrative coming to today. to condemn America, to say America should be defined by its birth defect of slavery.

What the Woodson Center’s reaction was, since the messages were black, is to identify black messages to provide an alternative narrative, not an alternative debate. And so what we said, that unless there is fact-based truths, then lies become normal. And so what we went back into the
history of black America, and so our first book, Red, White, and Black, Rescuing America from Revisionists and Race Hustlers, and now, A Pathways to American Renewal, these two books stand as evidence, because we went back and documented when whites were at their worst, blacks were at their best.

There were five major high schools at the turn of the century in New York, Baltimore, Washington, Atlanta, and New Orleans that had crumbling buildings, used textbooks, half the budgets of white schools, every one of those black high schools out-tested every white school in those cities. If we were able to perform, the best antidote to disrespect is performance. We understood that then.

The question is if we were able to accomplish these things in the midst of segregation. Why are our kids failing in systems run by their people today, by their own people today? So obviously the issue is not race. We say that it is a restoration of values. There were 25 elder care institutions in Philadelphia up until the 1960s. There were beautiful stone buildings right next to churches where parents and kids could come and serve the elderly and they would be cared for.

Then the government came along with the Comprehensive Mental Health and Mental Retardation Act and regulated 25 of these institutions in Philadelphia out of business, because they said you got to have an elevator in a facility over two stories, even though the elderly are on the first floor.
You’ve got to have a full-time nurse. There was tyranny by the credentialists. Certification became the power arbiter, not moral authority, but credentialed authority. As a result, these institutions within two years were obliterated.

What happened to the elderly? They went into these expensive, high-rise facilities that are being managed by these corporations, or they went into hospitals away from their communities and the death rate soared. That’s just one example of how government came in and obliterated and wiped out mediating institutions. Urban renewal wiped out whole business sections.

We document all of this in our two books so that it was government policies that decimated it. It wasn’t racism. It wasn’t a history of slavery or discrimination. A lot of middle class black civil rights leaders and all that profited from this takeover of these institutions. And so it’s more of a class issue that we have in society today than it is a race issue.

Mr. Jekielek:
There was an article that you wrote in The Hill about indigenous mediating institutions. Do nonprofits count as these mediating institutions? There is the homelessness and drug addiction crisis in some cities. One of the criticisms is that well-funded nonprofits are basically incentivized to maintain homelessness. You’re saying we should be supporting the mediating institutions, but there’s a lot of people saying these institutions aren’t doing such a good job.

Mr. Woodson:
The issue isn’t that all government is bad or all that private is good. Mediating institutions are different than not-for-profits. There was a study done by Don and Rachel Warren when they asked low-income people where they turn to in times of trouble, and they identify institutions within their own community. Real legitimate mediating institutions are distinct because they produce outcomes that the people accept. The kind of institutions you’re talking about are driven by the funders.

Most mediating institutions are not funded by the government. If you go into a community, you have to look at what is the source of the funding and what do they do. Just because they say they are an intermediary doesn’t mean that they are. In our publications we lay out clear standards on how you distinguish between a legitimate grassroots group and one that is imposing people.

First of all, the legitimate grassroots groups understand that you cannot generalize about the poor. Some people are just broke, but their character’s intact, and they use temporary assistance as an ambulance service, not a transportation system. They come in, they get help, they’re free. Then you’ve got category two, which are people who are disincentives. If they get a job, they’re going to lose daycare. So if you take the perverse incentives, they will prosper.

But the third group that our groups are concentrated on are people who are poor because of the chances that they take and the choices that they make. Legitimate grassroots people understand that redemption and transformation has to precede help. If a homeless program in Denver, for instance, that we support just gives people a place to live, they’re able to continue to drink and keep their behavior. Legitimate grassroots leaders and organizations have high moral standards that are required as a condition of help. They are able to generate that, inspire that, because many of the people running the programs were former addicts.

In other words, if the prodigal son, if the father had gone into the bar and given him the cloak, the ring, and the sandals when he was drinking, it would have validated his aberrant behavior. But it was only when the prodigal son, the Bible said, he came to himself and he became humble and contrite and went to his father and said, I don’t even deserve to be your father, to your son. And so grassroots organizations inspire that kind of redemption and transformation. And as a consequence, they’re able to recover whole communities of people. It’s important for that distinction to be made.

Mr. Mitchell:
We use the term mediating institutions, and we need to think about why we use it. And again, the great theorist Alexis de Tocqueville said, the future is going to be this unless we watch out. And the future will be one powerful state and a bunch of lonely, isolated individuals who are dependent upon the state. He says there has to be something that lies between the state and these lonely individuals that gathers them together through moral authority for starters. What really are we looking for in these mediating institutions? Why aren’t there philanthropic organizations that fit the bill?

Bob said it, the family’s fixed, the churches are fixed, but then there’s this vast domain where individuals or small groups of people are responding constantly to new situations, new persons that are coming along. They’ve got the fluidity to be able to move. They’ve got the deep knowledge to be able to respond. On the other hand, a lot of these philanthropic organizations have a policy that they want to impose on a world that’s very different.

Let me just back up one second to the 1619 Project, because Bob understated it when the 1619 project came out, there were a number of conservatives who said, America is not stained, it’s pure. The virtue of the 1776 project which I had some small part in was that we said, yes, that was that slavery thing. That was a bad thing.

But here’s the difference. Our criteria for moving forward is not that something is pure. Our criteria is, can it be redeemed? Our view was that America, for all of her problems, is still on the path toward hope and redemption. Suffering is not an argument against life. That’s the key here. The 1776 project differed from the 1619 project, who said, there’s systemic racism. There’s nothing you can do because that’s the moral lesson of systemic racism. You either can do nothing or you have to depend upon the state. We rejected that and we rejected those on the right who said, no, America is this pure project. It’s not.

Every nation is an impure project just as every family is an impure project. That doesn’t mean we don’t go on. The groups that Bob’s worked with, all of them, as Bob has said, have been through their personal hell, and that’s not an argument against life. That’s the kind of people we need support, and they’re everywhere if we just look.

Mr. Woodson:
Let me just say that the solution is not to fund more think tanks to produce white papers. That’s important, but it’s incomplete. I was blessed to spend five years at the American Enterprise Institute and did most of my writing
from there, and I really cherish that opportunity. What I’m saying more to my colleagues, leave your institutions and go and interact with some of the people you write about. Use your time to study their success and write about your success. Let it be reflected in your literature.

So that’s where we have a confluence of interest between learned knowledge and media knowledge, that we need both. If a political party can raise and spend one billion dollars in three months and come up with a deficit, certainly there’s enough private dollars around that we can invest in these mediating institutions so that it will enable them to demonstrate to the society that this moral and spiritual free fall that is consuming whites, blacks, rich, poor, because of this moral decline, that the answers to this abides in some of these mediating institutions and low-income communities. At the Woodson Center, that’s why we encourage that we make major investments.

We have what we call a Joseph Fund. We’re trying to raise $50 million, where 100% of that money will go out the door and invest in these institutions in the community so that they can begin to flourish and close the gap between what they can afford to do and what they’re capable of doing. There’s racial grievance among people, not only on the left, but on the right, too. There are some people on the right who don’t want this racial antagonism to go away because they’re profiting from it. We think that the true challenge is class and it’s not race.

Then the challenge we have is how do we encourage private investment in these media institutions so that they can yield the outcomes that will help the society restore the civic virtues. All of these groups that we support, 3,000 of them in 39 states, all operate on the values of our founders,
the virtues and values of the founders of this nation. And the way you persuade people to embrace these values is to see virtue in action. People want to see a sermon, they’re tired of hearing a sermon.

Our grassroots leaders are actually living sermons. If you’re for a smaller government, which I am, then you must be for aggressive support of media and institutions. Twenty-five years ago, we had a situation in Washington where there were 53 murders in a five-square-block area in a bending terrace public housing. We helped five ex-offenders who were intermediaries go in and negotiate a truce, and that murder rate went down
to one in 12 years. Think about the cost benefit of that intervention. Every time a person is shot or injured and they’re taken to an intensive care unit, it’s $5,000 a day, and also the social upheaval and the loss of wages.

Can you imagine if we were able to produce that kind of outcome, why don’t we invest in more of these intermediate interventions coming from mediating structures that have the consequence of changing, improving the behavior of people? We took some of the principles that we learned and took it to Milwaukee and applied it to like seven schools. As a result of that seven school intervention, they found out that crime was down in areas around the school 60%. There are interventions that are occurring that can help, so it’s practical.

Mr. Mitchell:
With the passing of Jimmy Carter, we are reminded of his phrase, there’s a malaise that has struck the country. And there is a malaise and government spending on social programs is now like pushing on a string. We’ve reached the point where it can no longer work. Alexis de Tocqueville, who I must cite again, said, democracy unleashes an energy never before seen in human civilization. And he says, I praise it not for what it does, but for what it causes to be done. He understands that if you give the local people the resources to build their own world.

Yes, it will be messy, but it unleashes an energy never before seen in human civilization. What it causes to be done is it draws people out of themselves. It helps them build a world together. And we have a crisis, especially among the young. They are enwrapped by the digital media. The only understanding of justice they have is performative justice, Black Lives Matter, and we stand with Ukraine. But are they going to do anything? No.

We have to revitalize America. The only way that we can do this is by decentralizing power, giving people the opportunities to make a mess of things, because they will. But if you do that, you draw people out of themselves, and they cease to be lonely and isolated, and they unleash this energy that America once had and that we can have again.

Mr. Woodson:
We give an example in our books about the Cajun Navy in Louisiana. When Hurricane Katrina hit, some Cajun fishermen got together and just started plucking people off the roofs of buildings. Now, it has spread to thousands. So whenever there’s a disaster someplace, the first responders are volunteers that are there even before FEMA arrives. That’s the American spirit of civic renewal that we’re trying to excite.

We have examples in our literature from all over the country where violence has existed. There were 600 kids from one public housing project in 14 years who went on to college, eliminating teen pregnancy. Drug dealers were driven out. There have been islands of moral and spiritual excellence that have occurred as a consequence of supporting these mediating institutions. But it’s episodic. We don’t have scholars from either side coming into these communities and studying the success.

That’s what we really need our scholars to come in and partner with our grassroots people and validate the triumph over despair. That’s where Josh and I are coming. We want to serve as a model for where these two worlds can come together to serve the interests of our community. But again, in order to do it, what I love about Josh is, as smart as he is, that’s my A student. I’m a C student. But Josh is humble enough to know what he doesn’t know. But he’s also humble enough to go in and ask and be inspired by what he sees, even though it’s being done by untutored people.

Mr. Jekielek:
Josh, it sounds like you are advocating for the smallest possible unit of governance whenever possible.

Mr. Mitchell:
We are always thinking about the proper relationship between a mediating institution and the state. Since the progressive era, beginning in the1880s,
we’ve increasingly seen the state as a substitute for mediating institutions. We have to not simply state that we’re against government. A lot of conservatives want to say zero government. The libertarian view is if it’s necessary, we'll have it, but we really don’t want it. We have to think about this differently.

We have to say the state and national government is a supplement to the mediating institutions, not a substitute for it. The EU has made a terrible mistake because they’re trying to have the EU be a substitute for the nation as opposed to a supplement to the nations. We have to think in terms of this language of supplement and substitute, to be able to get right the relationship between mediating institutions and government.

Bob pointed out to me a number of years ago that if you were really against government intervention, what would you have done with the integration of University of Alabama and the National Guard troops? I mean, that was probably a necessary intervention. So you want the state to step in, but you don’t want it to overstep. But if it’s going to be a supplement too, then we have to have these institutions, the mediated institutions, be revitalized in a very serious way. That’s the challenge.

Mr. Mitchell:
Yes, the challenge is how to make government on top but not on top, and that’s very different. When we had our gang intervention in Benning Terrace, these young men, just 16 of them, created all of this pandemonium. It was David Gilmore, the housing receiver, who hired them as maintenance personnel for six months. They removed more graffiti in three months than their maintenance crews did in three years. Because the young men had a sense of ownership of where they lived, they began to plant the flowers and engage in it.

David says that they were going to tear that development down at a cost of $3 million. But because of the peace treaty that was solved, that building now is going to be restored. So he says, it makes sense. I was going to tear it down for $3 million and have to relocate everybody there. Now I don’t have to do that. So I’m going to take a million of those dollars I saved and invest it in these young people. And now some of them are restaurant owners, and some of them are living successful lives.

There is an example of government reinvesting in mediating institutions not to do this as a permanent program, but to come in at a situation and create so these young men are off on their own their independence, but government stimulated that because of the changes of the behavior of the people, we don’t see the connection between human capital improvement and economic consequence of that improvement. And that’s the case that scholars can make.

Mr. Mitchell:
Social capital precedes economic capital. And so if we can fight to restore social capital, the economic well-being, back to our point about the middle class, that will follow. But you can’t just pour money in. You’ve got to restore social capital and that requires patience.

Mr. Jekielek:
One of you said it’s messy.

Mr. Mitchell:
It’s coarse. I’ve taught for a number of years at university. I’ve asked my students, to have freedom, you have to have messiness, even ugliness, even prejudice. To have freedom, you have to have all those things. Will you take it? And most of my students these days say, I don’t want the messiness, I'll take order. This is a huge, huge problem.

We have to be able to live with the ugliness of life and say that’s not the final word. That’s why I said suffering is not an argument against life. And the grassroots leaders have faced the ugliness of life and they’ve said, nope, this is not the final word. They are an inspiration. And not just to the people around them. We have, as Bob has said, we have a crisis of suicide in Palo Alto and the richest communities in the world, in the country and around the world.

We’re at a moment of despair in American politics. We have to give citizens of all ages the belief that notwithstanding suffering, there is hope. That is the cultural moment that we’re in right now. The only way to make good on it is if we can invest in the mediating institutions, because it’s only in those face-to-face relations where life genuinely feels to be substantial and good, not episodic, but genuinely in an unsustained way.

Mr. Jekielek:
Vivek Ramaswamy has advocated for making civic engagement a necessary part of life. You’re talking about empowering these mediating institutions, but it still feels a little bit abstract.

Mr. Mitchell:
Yes, I have a cautious endorsement. I’m always a little nervous about national programs. However, I think if they can kick start the spirit of the media and institutions, that’s great. I don’t care what university you teach in, students are not ready at age 18 to go to college. There should be a national year or two of service where people are thrown together from all different backgrounds, as they were in the military, thrown together to do something locally. Maybe you get some college tuition benefits. I’m not a policy person on this matter. But you’ve got to pull people out of themselves, get them engaged with other people so that they develop the habit of forming associations, and then they'll go back to their local communities.

Mr. Woodson:
When these young men were redirected from gang violence, the first thing we said to them, there is a price you must pay for the aid that you received. Okay? This isn’t charity. You need to pay back for what has been given to you. What are you passionate about? They said, we’re passionate about being coaches. Good. They became coaches. They’ve been coaching for over 20 years. So we introduced the requirement that you must give back for what you’ve received, reciprocity.

The reason we were able to sustain the peace out there is because they became surrogate fathers and big brothers to the younger kids. You can just have four of them in a room and 150 of them are sitting quietly, taking directions. We set up three football teams. Then the same community that used to be a killing field was packed with parents and kids being coached by these ex-gang members. There’s an example that is baked into the whole process. No one has to give instructions, but it animated naturally out of these relationships.

When I was at a business meeting, I said to the guys, are they ready for universities? No, let’s let them earn it more. So after a month, they called me, and I was at a business meeting in Vienna, Virginia, and I stopped to meet. I needed $15,000 to buy my boys uniforms. When we collected the money, when the suits were given, they were not given by the sponsors. They were given by the coaches. It’s a way of helping so that you’re supporting existing relationships and not some do-good or coming from outside offering this. How aid is given is as important as to what is given.

Every step is intended to reinforce the relationship between the coaches and the kids. They got to the point where the parents and the teachers said that, no, the young men said that the kids are disciplined when they were with us and not with their teachers and with their parents so they required the kids to have a behavioral card signed by both their teachers and their parents before in order for them to practice there is an example of a social control coming in a natural spontaneous way and you multiply that a thousand times there’s just so many unique ways that this is being done.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is about developing self-discipline. Also we were talking about this question of suffering. Suffering is going to be a part of life, so why not leverage that, instead of fear it? That’s what I’m hearing.

Mr. Mitchell:
Yes. I was recently at a gathering and I was asked to say the prayer. And I said, dear God, we know from before all time you’ve gathered us together. We thank you for our joys and for our sufferings. And after the meal, someone pulled me aside and said, what do you mean for our sufferings? I said, for our sufferings, for they teach us to. And I think we have to recognize that the sufferings, as horrendous as they can be, are invitations for us to do things that we can’t even imagine, to be called beyond ourselves and our comfort zone. I wish life weren’t that way, but the whole of human history is this way.

Mr. Woodson:
One of my favorite philosophers is Kahlil Gibran, who wrote, A Tear and a Smile. He wrote, I would not exchange the sorrows of my heart for the joys of the multitude, nor would I have the tears, the sadness flow from every part, turning to laughter. Personally, I'd rather my life remain a tear and a smile—a smile to show my joy in existence and a tear to show my longing that I have.

Mr. Jekielek:
How did de Tocqueville foresee all this? Please give us a quick history lesson. When de Tocqueville was writing Democracy in America, he saw where we are today. How did he see that?

Mr. Mitchell:
He was a young man in his late 20s. His father was nearly put to death during the French Revolution, and he wrote this magisterial book
called Democracy in America, which was published in 1835, and the second volume in 1840. I tell my students two things. First, it’s written under the shadow of the French Revolution, meaning you have these French who wanted to abolish the church and abolish the families, because it was time to have a whole new order. He saw that this would produce a powerful administrative state with lonely, isolated people.

The second thing is you have to understand this book to be the deepest rumination on the problem of loneliness in the democratic age. He writes in a letter, saying, it is not good for a man to be alone, especially for me. The whole book is written with an apprehension of the tremendous loneliness and isolation that would happen in the next several hundred years. He thought the Americans were singularly prepared to combat that because they had the habit of forming mediating institutions. The state comes second. The mediating institutions came first.

Americans had to deal with building a world together without the state for 100 years or so. This habit of forming associations gets passed on from generation to generation. Bob and I are saying that it is still there. We don’t have to invent anything. It’s really there. We just have to look around in our local communities, find the people who are silently, quietly doing miraculous work to hold together people who are in need and to hold together the community and support them. It’s all right there. We just don’t have the vision to see it.

Mr. Woodson:
In one of our essays by Dr. John Sibley Butler from the University of Texas at Austin, he talks about at the turn of the century, a Jewish scholar from Europe came to study blacks and how they handled oppression. He was like de Tocqueville. He came to study how blacks achieved great, great things under segregation.

Mr. Jekielek:
In a way, you’re saying that we should take our inspiration from what blacks did under Jim Crow.

Mr. Woodson:
Absolutely. We cut poverty in half in 1946 to 1964. There was no government intervention then. We cut programs. As I told you, I was born in 1937. We didn’t have elderly people mugged in the streets back then, but we do now. We didn’t have children shot in cribs, but we do now.

In our writings we talk about what happened in Europe after the fall of communism. A parallel polis was established where for five years civic institutions flourished. They provided daycare, performing arts, and even picked up the trash. They won the loyalty of the people in these Eastern Bloc countries.

Therefore, when they then turned that to politics, they won elections.
But they first developed loyalty so that people looked more to civic institutions than they did to government. And when you ask grassroots people, why do they turn to institutions that are in their own communities? Because these institutions have delivered for them in times of need.

Mr. Mitchell:
Let me add here, it’s curious, there’s the question both on the left and the right, how should black America be thought about? And I think it’s safe to say that on the left, black America has its moral authority, its suffering has been used as leverage for women’s rights, for gay rights, for the transgender rights. That it’s on the suffering of black America that the moral authority of these groups has emerged. Civil rights goes to women’s rights,
then goes to gay rights, and then goes on.

We can talk about those issues, but I think it is a mistake to say that these issues derive their moral authority from black America. On the left, black America is seen as the fulcrum point on the basis of which you build a bridge farther out with one group after another. On the right, on the other hand, there’s a deep reluctance to talk about multiple races, multiple groups. This is all one America. There’s the rule of law. We don’t have to talk about that. But I think what Bob and I are saying here is that, no, there’s a tremendous story. It’s a story about American strength.

Therefore the way to think about black America is Tocquevillian America. This is what black America had to do was respond to a state that was against it. And it responded in the very way Tocqueville says is the genius of America, which is the mediating institutions. Both the left and the right miss this. You’ve got an opportunity here for the whole country to come together and say, we don’t have to invent something. Black America is doing it.

Other parts of America are doing it too, maybe not quite as well, maybe some places better. But we need to look to black America not as the leverage point for innocent victimhood, that’s what the left has done to its detriment, and not as something we don’t even need to talk about. Because what black America shows us at its best is this Tocquevillian vision, which we must return to in order to revitalize her.

Mr. Woodson:
You saw this act in the election when the Democrats brought all these celebrities, black celebrities and Barack Obama and all these others. So all they have to do is bring these celebrities to the presence of black Americans and say, well, they stand for this. But there was a rejection of this. And instead, what low income black America did was vote their interest. To me, that’s a level of maturity, and that needs to be exploited.

Again, a lot of the people who purport to be progressives do so saying they are legitimate representatives of the so-called marginalized. If the so-called marginalized have an opportunity to speak for themselves and they say they don’t represent me. It undermines their moral authority and America can get back to the business of rebuilding its civic and moral and spiritual infrastructure.

Mr. Jekielek:
What should DOGE or other institutions be doing on day one to facilitate this vision?

Mr. Mitchell:
Minimally, we have to ask the question, what can be devolved back to the state? In my view, the Department of Education and the federal government have no business being involved in education. So it should be decentralized where possible, but with a full understanding that you don’t just cut spending and then everything takes care of itself. It means that citizens will have to step up again. Now we have an infantilized citizenry that’s concerned with Instagram and X and all the rest of social media. We’re spending way too much time on that, rather than engagement at the local level.

I tell my students, I would like every parent in America to go to sleep at night and wonder whether the educational system in the next school district or the next county is better than the one that they have. And if they’re worried about it, they need to spend their energies figuring out how to make their own school system much better, as opposed to infantilized citizens who just say, oh, the Department of Education will take care of it. Yes, emphasize cutting spending, but they have to doubly emphasize the fact that the burden will then come back to citizens to develop competencies to deal with these issues.

Mr. Woodson:
I'd like to bring 2,000 of my grassroots leaders together from all over the country, different racial, ethnic groups, and bring them before the DOGE people to say, listen to these people. Learn from them. Ask them how to reduce crime. How do you encourage kids to learn? Because there are models out there that every problem that you can think of have been successfully addressed at the local level. But again, the qualities that make them effective make them invisible. Our scholars need to leave their ivy towers and come into the communities that we have cultivated and learn from them to inform policies. That’s the challenge.

Mr. Jekielek:
Bob Woodson, Joshua Mitchell, such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Woodson:
Thank you.

Mr. Mitchell:
Thanks, Jan.