Charles Fain Lehman and Aaron Sibarium join Theodore Kupfer to discuss the sociology of “wokeness,” the roots of the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy, and the future of identity politics in an increasingly multiracial America.
Audio Transcript
Teddy Kupfer: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is Teddy Kupfer, an associate editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today are Charles Lehman and Aaron Sibarium. Charles is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Aaron is an associate editor of the Washington Free Beacon. And both of them have been writing about the spread of what might be called wokeness through American institutions, from business and medicine to higher education and the federal government.
It’s a popular topic to write about nowadays, but what sets their work apart is that it avoids a haphazard connect-the-dots approach to intellectual history, and instead seeks to understand the institutional roots of this ideological transformation. Charles and Aaron, thank you very much for joining me.
Aaron Sibarium: Thank you for having us.
Charles Fain Lehman: Glad to be back on the podcast.
Teddy Kupfer: Glad to have you. So let’s discuss the historical and theoretical background before we turn to some real-world examples. We should begin, although not everybody will agree, by stipulating that there actually is something called “wokeness.” Some package of beliefs maintaining, for example, that racism is embedded in American life. That disparities among groups are evidence of widespread bias, that interlocking systems of oppression exist and must be dismantled, and that we all have a duty to root them out, whether we’re a politician, a school teacher, or an editor at Bon Appetit magazine.
I think it’s fair to say that such a stance exists and is increasingly visible, but where did it come from? Some people try to answer by pointing to similarities between the tenets of wokeness and the work of say the Frankfurt school or the critical race theorists. But that doesn’t really explain why institutions have taken up wokeness with such zeal. Charles, in a cover story for the new issue of CJ, which is out now, you seek to answer that question by examining the legal environment in which businesses found themselves after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This is an environment in which discrimination was suddenly illegal, but the definition of what constituted discrimination was both vague and ever expanding. So why don’t you walk us through this history?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s important to underscore that most people’s experience of everyday wokeness comes not from reading Marxists, but from the ideas that trickle down to them through their workplace, through their educational institutions. That’s part of why I’m interested in this level of analysis because it says something about how everyday people take up these ideas.
In my CJ piece, what I’m interested in is the propagation particularly of race-conscious corporate policy. Policies within businesses that focus on differentiating people by race, being concerned with representation by race and other forms of affirmative action or related policies within the corporate environment.
So back in the 1960s, the major change that takes place in the wake of the Civil Rights Act is that there’s an effectively, there’s a de facto, there’s a de jure ban on discrimination in the workplace among other areas.
And the CRAs are broad in its language. It follows other statutes issued throughout the twentieth century, in which it places a blanket ban on a variety of kinds of discrimination, but doesn’t tell us a great deal about what terms like discrimination mean, what terms like affirmative action—which doesn’t show up in the CRA but is used in subsequent regulatory language—what terms like affirmative action mean. At the same time, it creates this vast regulatory, apparatus: the EEOC, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, the branches of the DOJ, which have a direct interest in ensuring that the poorly articulated stands of the CRA are enforced to the absolute idea of law. So what ends up happening through the 1970s is that many corporations respond by setting up offices whose primary goal operates under what I call a paradigm of compliance, that they make sure that they are following all of the rules for race-conscious policy laid out in the CRA and enforced by regulators subsequently. So align in here, you think about diversity trainings today, which are these really very strange obsessive affairs.
In the 1960s and 1970s, diversity trainings were a litany of dos and don’ts, and maybe a couple of case studies for the participant to ponder. The point being the goal was to basically say, how do we avoid running afoul of the law? It’s not, I argue, until the 1980s—when Reagan tries to ratchet some of this stuff back—that this now-entrenched bureaucracy and set of norms that say it’s important for companies to be race-conscious in how they operate that those entities, those norms and practices, try to find alternative justifications for themselves. And in so doing, they become systematically entrenched, detached from the external regulatory justification.
Teddy Kupfer: So that’s the early history. In the past decade, few years though, the recitation of these diversity, equity, and inclusion views seems to have changed. It’s grown more militant, more repetitive, more strident in tone. Listeners will, of course, remember the groveling apologies for social injustice that Fortune 500 businesses issued last summer. We watched as New York Times employees protested the publication of a U.S. senator’s op-ed. And in City Journal, we’ve had some reporting on the details of diversity training programs in schools and businesses, all of which seem to sound the same. So the pace and the similarity of this transformation seems to require further explanation. And both of you have located that explanation in some key concepts from academic sociology. So why don’t you explain what these concepts are and briefly talk about how they account for what’s going on today?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. So we’re interested in different kinds of institutional pressures and Gabriel Rossman—a professor of sociology at UCLA—has a great piece in City Journal. It’s really a companion piece to my own in which he walks through some of the concrete terms from institutional theory, a school of sociological thought. And what Gabriel highlights is that basically one of the key questions for institutionalists is, why are organizations so similar? Why do they exude what’s called isomorphism, same-shapeness? Why is it given the pressures of the market to diversify and multiply that organizations end up following such similar norm standards, etc.? And there’s three terms that can be used, they’re all forms of isomorphism.
So talking about coercive isomorphism, which is where basically an organization adopts something because the law says that it has to, or other people in the market compel it to. Coercive isomorphism brought compliance into existence in the 1960s. Normative isomorphism, that’s the second one. Really, what this means in practice is that normative isomorphism is the rising of values up from the workforce. So the churn of the highly educated into the workforce perpetuates normative isomorphism because the highly educated bring with them some set of values prior to entering the company and that shapes the behavior of the company. And the third one is mimetic isomorphism, which is where organizations model their behavior on other “industry” leaders. So if for instance Microsoft is doing something or Google is doing something, you want to copy what they’re doing.
And these are mechanisms by which notions of the validity of race-conscious policy can propagate. A, if you get a large company doing it, many other smaller companies will copy it: that’s mimetic isomorphism. B, if you get a bunch of college kids you’ve hired entering your firm, they will pressure you to comply with more values: that’s coercive isomorphism. But then C, and I think most importantly, the legal environment can set the terms for how we think about these problems in the first place. In the case of the CRA, it says race-conscious policy is a thing that we need to build a whole infrastructure to do in our corporations in the first place. That’s coercive isomorphism.
Aaron Sibarium: To piggyback on what Charles just said, it’s worth noting that, first of all, all of these different isomorphism are happening at the same time. And second, there are, I’d say there are interaction effects between them. So for example, coercive and mimetic isomorphism are often related. If a bunch of firms, in order to comply with a vague anti-discrimination statute, all start adopting the same practices to signal compliance. And you’re the one holdout, you might worry that a judge is going to note that you’re the holdout and that you’ll be more susceptible to legal liability. And so the reason that you may be mimicking what these other firms are doing is in part, because you know that if you don’t, you’re more vulnerable to the legal pressures Charles is describing. So I mean, I would just emphasize that these isomorphisms all work together, they’re not necessarily separate or separable processes, and that just makes disrupting or dismantling these pressures a lot more difficult.
Teddy Kupfer: Aaron, I have a two-part question for you. First, let’s see if we can ground some of this historical sociological talk with some real-world examples. You’ve broken a number of stories in the Free Beacon that show just how pervasive these views have become, from Yale Law School and Fieldston to the Centers for Disease Control and the American Bar Association. Why don’t you talk about some of this reporting and, if you can, explain how the historical background helps us make sense of it?
The second part of the question is: what would a progressive make of all this? He might find this conversation objectionable, retorting that conservatives are really just overreacting to rhetoric in order to hold together their political coalition. If wokeness even exists, a progressive might say, it’s at least directionally correct. And in any case, why does it matter? The odd training module or overheated corporate statement is ultimately inconsequential to the material forces that have a bearing on the direction of the country. So are we paying too much attention to rhetorical excesses?
Aaron Sibarium: Sure. So one good example of what Charles was calling coercive isomorphism that’s more concrete is accreditation bodies. There is one in particular called the National Association for Independent Schools that accredits a lot of private schools, including places like Dalton and Fieldston that you’ve heard a lot about. And the American Bar Association, too, accredits all law schools in the United States, the joint liaison hosted by the American Medical Association and the Association for American Medical Colleges accredits all med schools in the United States. And so these accrediting bodies are hugely powerful. You really have to do what they say and all of these bodies without fail have adopted wokeism in part because of the influence of the upper professional class people that Charles was talking about. You could call that normative isomorphism, the sorts of people who populate the American Medical Association are the same sorts of people of the same social class who populate the National Association for Independent Schools and the American Bar Association.
So what ends up happening, right, is that all the accrediting bodies have somewhat similar values. And that means that all the schools that they accredit have to have those values, because invariably the accrediting bodies say that diversity, equity and inclusion is a criterion for accreditation. And if you don’t show that you’re taking steps to diversify your student body very concretely and you don’t have something that you can report on an accreditation form, you’re going to be in trouble. You may not lose your accreditation, but you’re definitely going to get a stern talking to, you may be put on probation, and it will not be fun. So of course schools never actually lose their accreditation. What they do is they just bend over backwards to obsequiously comply with the DEI stuff that’s being pushed by their accreditors. And I don’t mean to suggest that this is all top-down in position.
I think that in part, because there’s internal bureaucracies within all these law schools and medical schools and private schools and what have you, there’s some just organic grassroots pressure for it at this point. But there also is this top-down centralized push in a lot of fields of education. And that I think does help explain why the way, say, Yale Law talks and behaves and the way that maybe Mount Sinai Medical School behaves and the way that Dalton behaves, why these are all similar. It’s because they’re all subject to the same incentives. So that, I hope, makes the terminology we’ve been throwing around a little more concrete.
But you asked another question Teddy, which is, well, why should we care? And if all of this stuff were just about using the same language and that was it, yeah, okay. It’s not the end of the world. But the problem is that the language is meant to convey a particular set of ideas and values that have actual policy implications. You saw this with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention consciously choosing a vaccination plan that their own model said would result in thousands of preventable deaths, just in the name of racial equity. The distribution of vaccinations to them between racial groups was more important than the actual utilitarian benefits of the vaccination.
Another example that I’m actually working on writing something about now that I think is even scarier, is that there is a concerted push in antitrust law, including within the Federal Trade Commission that has huge enforcement powers to do what they call anti-racist antitrust policy. And it’s not entirely clear what that means, but an FTC commissioner named Rebecca Slaughter who has a lot of power, she’s one of five people who votes on antitrust policy. She offers a clue on Twitter when she says, and I’m not making this up, that we should look to South Africa for our antitrust policies.
South Africa is one of the only developed countries to integrate concerns about racial equity and historically marginalized groups into competition policy. Firms have to have a particular like a certain percentage of black stakeholders or ownership stakes. If a merger will result in a less diverse conglomerate, overall less diverse, management antitrust authorities in South Africa have been known to block the merger. Now, why is that a problem? Well, in South Africa, what’s ended up happening is this race-conscious affirmative action in law and economic policy has led to a lot of corruption and crony capitalism, which has reduced investment, which has increased unemployment.
The unemployment rate in South Africa is something like 30 percent. It’s really high. And that, of course, does not do with them any good when it comes to social stability and crime. And so this summer when you heard the president of South Africa was brought up on some corruption charges and it was a match that lit this long burning kindling. And the country erupted into riots that killed over 300 people and cost tens of thousands of jobs, billions in damages, and just was insanely destructive. It’s not entirely because of their race-conscious policies, but the race-conscious policies definitely played a role.
And you have now, American government officials with a lot of power saying, “Hey, why don’t we model our laws and enforcement on South Africa?” So this stuff actually matters and can affect people’s lives and affect who lives and dies. So it’s not just about language. It actually has policy significance.
Charles Fain Lehman: If I can hop on at the end here and say, I think part of the value of the institutional frame is it let’s just answer questions like why do people keep getting more extreme about this stuff? Aaron alluded earlier to this weighing of decisions for vaccine prioritization between trying to save lives and the value of racial equity and that sort of contrasting obviously utilitarian thing with fuel to you to a particular set of values is a classic example of what happens when norms, notions, practices, etc. get “institutionalized,” So in the second half of my article, I argue that what happens in the 1980s is that Reagan takes his foot off the gas a little bit on federal pressure and these compliance bureaucracies shift gears.
And they say, “Okay, we got to have race-conscious policy because that’s what’s good for business.” They make what’s called the business case for diversity. And as it turns out there isn’t really a business case for diversity. It’s not really necessarily beneficial. Diversity doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t necessarily help. The net effects are small either way, but this serves as a fig leaf over a set of notions and practices that it is good for your company to strive to have more diversity, more racial inclusion, etc., which become, again, what are called institutionalized norms, things that are done simply because they are done and deviation from which merits social sanction, independent of its utilitarian value. And so what we see today, to go to Aaron’s point, is people’s strict adherence to these norms that are not grounded in reality. They’re not measurable, they’re not related to some external benefit, but are pursued as goods in themselves. Consequently, the result is there is no upper limit on the craziness that they can entail.
Aaron Sibarium: Yeah. I think another driver of this is that the civil rights bureaucracy shortly into its life, started to transition away from just looking at intentional discrimination and began looking more to disparate impact and disparities, and in particular to how those disparities could be closed. And the closure of the disparities in many cases became a metric for the success of the civil rights bureaucracy. And there was a very practical reason for that. It wasn’t that they were all proto-Kendi-ist ideologues, it was that they were bureaucrats who needed to prove that their salaries were accomplishing something. And you can’t really prove that you are changing hearts and minds, or it’s very difficult to prove that and getting rid of intentional acts of discrimination. It’s much easier to prove that you are closing just objective statistically measurable gaps between racial groups.
One reason that I think there’s not really a limit to this stuff is because just they have a practical, pragmatic incentive to make it all about outcomes. And once you start looking for differences in outcomes, you’re going to find them everywhere. So there’s something just inherent in the very logic of bureaucracy needing to make social reality legible in order to claim that the bureaucracy is doing something to improve social reality. That inner logic, I think, explains a lot of the push toward the business practices Charles is talking about. And then I think in turn explains why some of these woke ideologies have emerged. They serve as a kind of post hoc convenient rationalization for all these bureaucracies for what they’re already doing. If you just define racism as the presence of disparities as Kendi basically does well, then suddenly it’s perfectly principled for bureaucracies to do this race conscious policy.
So and this is almost a kind of, you could say Marxist explanation for the rise of wokeness. Marxist in the sense that it’s rooted in the material incentives of various agents in the system, but yeah. It’s not that the people necessarily have to be convinced of Kendi-ism, or have some religious awakening. It’s just sort of like, well, we’re already doing this and, oh, look, here’s an ideology that says that what we are doing and indeed have to do is good and moral. Okay. That’s the ideology we’ll go with.
Teddy Kupfer: Yeah. It’s almost a Marxist/public-choice theory horseshoe theory. I have a small question before we get to the last point: do we have a sense of the scale of the diversity industry? I mean, you guys are alluding to the bureaucracy’s need to expand itself. And obviously there have been discussions of the ever-expanding administration in universities. There have been some old estimates that I believe from the early aughts of the amount of money flowing around in the diversity industry. But do we have a sense of how big it is now?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. We only have hints. And the reason for that is because of course many of these firms are not public; they’re private. So it’s hard to keep track of that. The old estimate is that the diversity industry is worth, gosh, I want to say it was $3 billion, but that’s in the early 2000s, as you mentioned. It’s almost certainly an order of magnitude bigger than that. There are other minor indicators. So for example, the Heritage Foundation just put out a report where they said that 79 percent of school districts with more than 100,000 students have chief diversity officers. That’s an interesting estimate. There’s some more evidence on sort of the scale in school, but we don’t know. I’ve done reporting on one firm influential in New York City, a nonprofit called Pollyanna, which used to have five clients and make $40,000 a year. And in 2019 it had, I think 20 clients made $250,000 a year. And who knows what the numbers are going to be like in 2020, I’m waiting for that final figure to come out. So there’s almost certainly been exponential growth in this industry is something we can say for sure.
Teddy Kupfer: So we need to turn to the last practical question, which I think is a common question on issues like this: what is to be done? A number of solutions have been offered at least from those who think that this is a problem. Some see businesses going woke, say the culprit is stakeholder capitalism—the notion that companies should be involved in trying to solve social problems—and argue for a return to shareholder primacy as the antidote. Others see the role of civil rights laws, which we’ve been discussing, and say that we either need to expand them to protect political beliefs, or we need to extirpate the civil rights laws altogether, or maybe engage in some targeted legal warfare to try to unravel concepts such as disparate impact that have been especially determinative. And then others—I’m thinking of Richard Hanania and a recent article in American Affairs—say that the only solution may be to exit: institutional pluralism, he calls it. Create alternative institutions that are non-woke and allow people to live free from the mainstream. So in your infinite wisdom, what do you think is to be done? How, if you think this is a problem, should policy makers and intellectuals seek to tackle it?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. I think in some instances in my mind, the ideal model is, do the work to make exit possible. And then if people want to exit, they can exit. I think exit works really well in the school space. We’ve got a great model there, like school choice is the solution for crazy schools. It would not necessarily, going to be true in the business space, the university level, because of these isomorphic pressures, because in order to follow the whims of the accreditors, or because of you need to get along with your peers, it’s harder to go your own way. In order to have a school choice movement, you have to have the laws that permit charter schools.
And I think there are analogies here, the thing that I would say that I argue in the piece is that the plain language of the CRA prohibits discrimination on the basis of race among other things. One of the few institutions that conservatives have been systematically consistently able to control over the past couple of decades is the courts. We have a friendly court system that’s willing to say, look, the CRA’s ban on discrimination should exclude employers from compelling white people to profess their racism, it should exclude employers from segregating training sessions, should prohibit hiring. In fact, does prohibit hiring on the basis of race, which many firms are winking at if not actually doing, making it easier.
We’re clearly articulating the minimum standards of compliance with federal law makes it easier for firms that would like to dissent to dissent and simultaneously going after some of the worst excesses as violations of those same rights, I think sends a strong signal, it curbs the worst excesses. It stops the perpetually accelerating process. Those are the two tools that I would think about using.
Aaron Sibarium: Yeah. I mean, I broadly agree with that. There need to be two different changes with civil rights law. So the first is you do want to have the courts—frankly, ideally Congress, but a law may not be possible—but ideally you do have the compliance standards spelled out more. And in particular, it should be made explicit effectively that what Robin DiAngelo and people are peddling essentially constitutes anti-white harassment or racism and is not allowed. And stuff with compelled speech can also help with that in certain contexts.
But then I think the other thing you have to do, which is more thorny, but ultimately is very important, is you need to pare back some of the disparate impact stuff. I mean, I don’t necessarily really think you need to totally get rid of it and that’s probably not possible anyway. But I mean, the root of Kendi-ism and the root of wokeness, and the thing that is most concerning about these ideologies, I think is ultimately not that they tell white kids that there are oppressors bad and stupid as that may be. I think the more concerning thing is that they see racial disparities or at least certain kinds of racial disparities involving certain groups as ipso facto illegitimate. And you just can’t really run a functioning society on that premise because you know what? In the real world for various cultural and historical reasons, groups are just going to be different and any neutral policy will have disparate impact.
And so, yeah. You need to, I think, reform the law and ultimately reform all kind of bureaucratic institutions in a way where they don’t see disparities and conclude, “That’s a problem that needs fixing. It might be, but it also, might not be.” And in many cases I would argue it actually isn’t. Right. I mean, it’s not a problem in my view that Stuyvesant is 75 percent Asian, that is not a problem. And I think that we just need to get rid of the legal and institutional drivers that push people to say it’s a problem.
Charles Fain Lehman: A great example here briefly. I think it is likely that affirmative action will be deemed federally illegal within the next, I don’t know, five years, through the Harvard case if nothing else. I just don’t think the liberals can count to five on the court for that case. And that will be a watershed moment. Yeah, affirmative action policy is definitely contributing to the plain language of the CRA. They definitely violate federal law. If you want to be a recipient of federal funds, you’re going to have to stop admitting kids partially on the basis of race, that’s going to change things a lot, which will change things, both in the short run, but also in the long run, because those norms will no longer be explicitly embraced by regulators and consequently downstream from that. Some colleges will no longer explicitly embrace those norms. And consequently downstream of that, many students will no longer explicitly embrace those norms at the margin. And that shifts both the institutional pressures today and the institutional pressures tomorrow.
Aaron Sibarium: Yeah. I mean, how optimistic are you though, Charles? Because I think in the short run schools are going to fight this like the plague, at least Harvard and Yale will and find all excuses to do affirmative action without saying they’re doing it, like they already do, but just into overdrive. I mean, do you think that this will ultimately result in enough serious sanctions or threats of sanctions that they really will change their behavior? I mean, it’s an open question. It’s so deeply institutionalized. It’s like I have a tough time even conceiving of the kind of radically different reality you seem to imagine.
Teddy Kupfer: They’re already good at concealing what it is they’re doing. Like, in the Harvard case, you’ve seen multiple different—you bury justification on top of obscurantism and all of a sudden it becomes unclear what the admissions people are even talking about. I’ll yield to Charles in a second, but I don’t think it’s too hard to imagine schools saying, well, we’re just correcting for socioeconomic balance while using some arcane language to continue doing affirmative action in practice.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. I mean the pessimistic case here is the University of California system, where they do have de facto affirmative action, and they have to obscure it because the state constitution prohibits affirmative action. That said, the reason to be optimistic at Harvard, not just because I think the anti-affirmative-action side will win. The reason to be optimistic about that case is it was the work of, I mean, it is in essence, the work of one professional litigator and then a series of people around him. But that is an example of leveraging the court system. Well, where you say here’s a concrete harm that’s being done because of these discriminatory institutions, the plain meaning of the law is that you cannot discriminate in this way. If you keep doing it, we’re going to make your lives very unpleasant through the legal system that protects our rights to not be discriminated against.
Look, is it guaranteed that there will be success? No. It’s ultimately a political project, but I think that there are avenues to apply pressure that are only now beginning to be explored. And I am optimistic about the impact that will have given the composition, particularly the federal bench, but also the power of the state houses, the conservatives exercise. I think, yes, there will be obscurantism. Yes, they will try to hide these practices going forward, but also like eventually you can make it costly enough that they just have to give up. Yes, the values are deeply institutionalized, but eventually they have to run up against reality if reality is harmful enough to them if it doesn’t yield.
Aaron Sibarium: I mean, one other thing I would just bring up is, well, I agree with everything that I and Charles have said about this being largely about law and about bureaucratic incentives. It does seem to me that wokeism has benefited from a perceived moral high ground, which comes from the just fact that—while I don’t think that any given disparity is ipso facto illegitimate, the United States does not have just some disparities in a few areas. It has very dramatic disparities between blacks and whites, with the former having been subjugated by the latter in a pretty brutal way for centuries. And I think part of the challenge here is in acknowledging that history and not just saying, “You shouldn’t care about it, whatever it’s 2021, leave it behind.” Because I think that that politically just, I am not convinced that that works. The challenge is to acknowledge that without bending on the woke stuff.
Charles Fain Lehman: I think what you can say very concretely is that Americans like equality of opportunity and dislike the enforced equality of outcomes. Systematic quotas are strongly opposed by American voters, the states of California and Washington after multiple times, for example, both retain affirmative action bans. So you can say they’re preexisting disparities, but the American people will not be on the side of resolving these disparities through enforced equality. The project for equality can only be achieved through obscurantism and through bureaucratic manipulation. So I’m optimistic about exposing these people to democratic accountability.
Aaron Sibarium: Yeah. I mean, I think another reason for optimism that we haven’t talked about is just the changing racial composition of the United States in part under the influence of immigration. Wesley Yang talks a lot about this, but the whole, both the MAGA and critical-race-theoretic discourses are implicitly rooted in a black-versus-white model that just is increasingly obsolete in a world of interracial marriage. And in a world of where there has recently been pretty high immigration rates. That’s not to say that we want tons and tons of immigration and that there aren’t problems associated with it.
But the benefit of a record-high share of the population being foreign-born is that it disrupts the old racial categories on which not just CRT conceptually and intellectually is based, but also these laws and structures that Charles and I have been talking about are based. And so I think that as that continues, there is some reason to think that there will just be a limit to how far the woke stuff can go simply because eventually it will just run into the racial realities of the United States in 2021 onwards in the next few decades. And those realities just are not the realities of the 1960s or 1970s or even 1980s.
Teddy Kupfer: Right. With that, listeners, don’t forget to check out Charles’s work on the City Journal website and Aaron’s reporting in the Washington Free Beacon. We will link to each of their author pages in the description. You can also find City Journal on Twitter @CityJournal and on Instagram @cityjournal_mi and Charles and Aaron are on Twitter as well, @CharlesFLehman and @aaronsibarium. As always, if you like what you heard on the podcast, please give us a five star rating on iTunes. And Charles and Aaron, thank you very much for coming on.
Aaron Sibarium: Thank you so much for having us.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, thanks. Thanks once again.
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