Prepared by nature for that existence. That idea preexisting rights of the Scientific Academy of north america but it gets coopted by science. In many ways science becomes one of the key areas for defending race and for defending the injustices of modern slavery. I write about that in the book for a few reasons. One of the good ones is actually thats the path that allows universities to emerge by the 1830s. As independent actors in the political sphere. Its precisely the ability of university and faculty and officers to argue in defense of slavery that creates the space in the public sphere. Host i assume because it is the university that they are the center of learning so therefore what more appropriate place to take place and validate this racist science or raise science youre talking about . Gaska the prestige of the university rises with race and then race creates the prestige of the university so that race ultimately unfettered if you remember the beginning of our conversation we said these are Church Denominational schools. The break free of the church in the 19th century. Largely because they have the capacity through science to make secular arguments. Host they start with nonsecular religious support and as they progress and become more influential but break free of that and align themselves with the pseudoscience. And my fair to say pseudoscience . Guest absolutely in one of the key elements is the rate rise of racial science creates an public prestige and universities but the modern universities found exact way that moment. One of the things i would argue about the question of reparations and social justice is we have to remember the troubled history of the American University doesnt and when the book ends. It continues into the 20th century because those same racial concepts actually come to justify all sorts of new brutalities in the modern world. We shouldnt forget that a lot of those ideas didnt have their origin on campus but they got their legitimacy on campus. They got refined on campus. They got validated on campus. They got modernized on campus and got their prestige on campus. Host is there another 10 years . [laughter] to go from the 1830s forward . Guest whoever wants to i will help them every step of the way. Host its fascinating. Guest the young person with a full head of hair that wont set project that will help them every step of the way. Host amazing. To say its at pageturner doesnt do it justice and i encourage everyone to please read this book and i started off making sure that people understood the this is not a textbook. This is not a textbook. This is an excellent chronological experience that you have taken our universities that we hear so much about and really it is their very history. Its their history from the beginning to where they are now. I do hope you will spend another 10 years doing it because you did this one justice. Thank you very much. The book is ebony and ivy and professor craig steven wilder. You have my most admiration for required reading. Youre watching cspan2 with politics and Public Affairs weekdays the train live coverage of the u. S. Senate. On weekdays whats the Public Policy events and every week and the latest nonfiction authors and books. You can see past programs in their schedules that our website and join in the conversation on social media sites. I think radio is the longest and the best form of media left. Unprecedented. Only cspan knows how important the conversations are. Read books the way that i do, talk to the authors seriously. Tremendously revealing what authors have not read because they dont get many people that have read there books and know what theyre talking about with page notes, and it is so rewarding for them. I get a great deal of satisfaction. The highest compliment is that is the best interviewer i have had. Love the interview. New collection. Some of which are old. That makes my day. I like radio. Three hours is an abundance of time. More with a radio talk host sunday night at a clock on cspan queue name. Up next on book tv, after words with guest host Susan Glasser talking with Christian Caryl on his book strange rebels 1979 and the birth of the 21st century. This senior fellow of the center for National Studies at mit argues that a leftleaning consensus developed across the world and that counterrevolution representing a new era began in 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher as british Prime Minister and the overthrow of the shah in iran. This is about an hour. Host hello. We are here to talk about your terrific new book strange rebels 1979 and the birth of the 21st century. I am going to let you explain in a second why it is that 1979 was really the crucial his point to history. But let me first start of a little bit of explanation for what i think is a really unusual book that you have done. I know it is a labor of love. But for those of you joining us today, a longtime correspondent and a contributor as well as my colleague who contributes to a Foreign Policy magazine. And a i think you have done something very unusual with this book which is, you have managed to do, in a way, the impossible, linking together in one place Margaret Thatcher and Ayatollah Khomeini as characters in a unified counterrevolutionary year of 1979. Very provocative piece, but this was a year in which basic belief that backlash or the return of market and religion to Global Politics in a big way signaled a accountant counterrevolution toward the earlier postwar era. How did we come up with that . Could it possibly write a book that says Margaret Thatcher, ayatollah, the communists, the iranian revolutionaries, never mind Pope John Paul the second and a resurgence of religion as a factor of polish nationalism which is a whole fascinating part of the book. How do you come up with putting these things together . It had a lot to do with my reporting in afghanistan after september 11th. You were there, too. We actually if memory serves, we actually stayed in the same house for a while. Youre with the Washington Post that. I was with this week. At house struck me and had this shag carpet and these tubular light fixtures, a ranch style house. Was the kind of houses that we were growing up in the 70s, when i was a kid. I was struck by that. When you went outside you were driving around in 1970s, american cars, some times a track tape players. The ministry buildings, the government buildings are of the 1970s. And then when you went to the bookstore you found all of these great post cards and books about afghanistan in the 1970s. And what all of it showed was that afghanistan was actually an upandcoming country in the 1970s. It was really going somewhere. And at the end of the 1970s, it is a law and history starts running in reverse, as it were. And the more time i spent in afghanistan the more i found myself wondering. We should not take this as a self evident thing when an entire country goes into reverse. And during my reporting of the past couple of years i began to notice similar things in other places. And i began connecting the dots and thinking about what happened at the end of the 1970s. And i realize that if you look in a globally is an important moment. We tend to focus on 60s, western europeans tend to focus and the 60s. But if you look get it from a global perspective, i now think it looks quite that way. My book was kind of exploration, an attempt to figure out why this was so. Host lets take the five. Briefly. You have afghanistan, as you mentioned. I always thought it was like the brady bunch spirit it was literally a copy of the house and the brady bunch with the open staircase, you know, the family would come down, the opening scene. And yet it had been most recently occupied before newsweek took it over by leaders of a terrorist organization. But it is a great point that you make. Afghanistan and the communist takeover of afghanistan which happened in 1979, china, the rise and the beginning of a turn , and then end to the cultural revolution. Poland, as we mentioned, the election of the polis to the polish Pope John Paul the second and his return to the precursor of the solidarity movement. Great britain, the election, and then the tall malts over the british economy that has been lost, part of the historical narrative of britain after thatcher. Some looking for to come back to that. And then number five, of course, the one parlay that most people think of first, the iranian revolution, the toppling of the shah end the hostage crisis. That is an awful lot of ground to cover. Lets start with thatcher. There is a huge outpouring of tributes your bird texas are some of the myth. Guest i tried to do that. It is always a challenge because you want to show why someone is worth knowing about in the first place. Theres been a lot of revision of the history of thatcher come but, of course, first of many have to establish why she was a board in the first place. A very few people vote a transformative figure it generated a lot of myths. There are many about her. For example, american conservatives think of for as this icon of conservatism. Guess what, she was in favor of National Health insurance, never seriously tried to dismantle the Health System because she knew how popular it was. She voted for the law when she was in parliament, decriminalizing homosexuality. She never interfered with gun control. If she had a chance she voted for abortion. So the social issues in which britain sometimes have very different opinions than american conservatives she does not look like a tradition of conservative. The traditional story is her relationship with ronald reagan. No question that there were close. They adore each other, but they were both very intense and then send went came to defending the National Interest of their respective countries. Make no mistake, even when it came to ronald reagan, she was not shy about defending a National Interest. Host she was not scared about much. Is really about the economy in many ways, our legacy kind of her rise and fall according to your account. Guest yes. For example, we live now in a world where it has been taken for granted that capitol can flow across boundaries without any barriers that almost. The very first thing she did when she became Prime Minister was dismantled capitol controls in great britain. There was a time in britain or if you wanted to leave the country yet to fill out a form, and then it would give you 50, you know, french or something if you were going to france. You actually had a bureaucratic procedure. She did away with all of that which was important as a prerequisite for what came later, the huge deregulation project that turn london into a european and local financial center. We take all of this for granted today. We justice and that this is a given. Well send that Big Companies should not multinational corporations should not be on by governments. Other parts of her legacy perhaps have not endured because we face as different conditions. Austerity is a good example. She was very austere and her financial policies. And those sorts of policies are really coming under attack a lot so i think economic to she was hugely important in shaping this marketoriented world that we live in today, but by no means at all aspects of her legacy remained in place. Host it is this shocking howl much she is end up as the matriarch of modern politics and may be a reason that her successor, david cameron, embarked upon that path, as a response to the financial crisis of 2008. She has been much in vogue even if actually be conditions bear almost no resemblance to the kind of math, heavily nationalized economy that she was dealing with in 1979 speech you exactly. She did reduce the punitively high rate of personal income tax. 83 percent, incomprehensible. No country as far as a personal income tax like that today, but at the same time she raised taxes on consumption because you believe in balanced budgets. She was willing to raise taxes to make the books balance. And in this she was quite different from reagan who, you know, allowed enormous deficits to build up which was quite a source of friction between the two of them. But when american conservatives house seat to position themselves as, you know, part of her legacy, i really wonder if theyre paying attention to that part of it. She was a budget hawk, not averse to raising taxes. The early part of for skynyrd. Host the willingness to use all the tools. It is certainly not the direction that american conservatives on capitol hill have gone in dealing with this latest budget crisis. Sometimes history gives us lessons, and sometimes we dont know them. And i think, you know, it brings me right to the lightning rod subjects of the book, iran and afghanistan, countries that are very much front page news in the United States today in terms of policies that, frankly, get stuck and in many ways were dealing with the legacy of the 1979 policies, but not sure that we have come up with a better way to negotiate with the iranians and we did at the time of the hostagetaking in afghanistan. Have we learned the lessons of the last superpower to find itself enmeshed in a war there . Is hard to say that when a war in afghanistan is now the longest war in u. S. History by a long shot. So lets start with iran, for example. What surprises you delve into the history, something that you feel like you know. A lot of things that you did not know or forgotten. One of the most fascinating things that we have had built into the history of the iranian revolution is this blend of the old in the new. One calls the revolutionary traditionalism. It was a revolution. It overthrew the shah, but it was conservative staged in part by men in white beards in turbans, and a aligned themselves at the beginning with non as llamas democrats, secular, in some case nationalist, and the forces of the left. And ito was very smart in a way that he talked like a leftist. He loved talking about imperialism and colonialism and the fight against americans in germany. And he was very, very good at incorporating that sort of rhetoric which played a huge role in bringing the leftist and the other revolutionaries into his coalition. When we did not need them anymore, he discarded them. They had some very interesting characteristics you have this combination of an elected parliament and president which is the legacy of the democratic revolution, shall we say. And then you have the Supreme Leader who is really appointed by the other cleric and you exercises ultimate authority. Even today more than 30 years after the revolution we still see a power struggle between the president , the people who support him, and the Supreme Leader. There been power struggles says the day the Islamic Republic was founded. Never quite seems to come arrest. Fascinated by the with a legacy that ayatollah established continues to shape that country today very clearly. Host and particularly relevant, another president ial election coming up in just a few weeks in june, and that think youll see that tension is of as americans continued to a struggle with the question of who really makes decisions in todays Islamic Republic. You can we negotiate with. And that is another striking thing. The internal american positions at the highest level, the u. S. Government over how we should approach this new more threatening iran. And you chronicle how the secretary of state had one point of view, much more in favor of negotiating a more conciliatory stance. You could be writing a story you could read page. Guest those things are very similar. The thing that was new, of course, nobody ever encountered an islamic revelation revolutionary Movement Like this. People at the time, there were looking for all kinds of comparisons, people comparing ayatollah to ghandi, wherever comparison, he is a religious leader. Pretty much as simple. And when you look at this policy feud, not putting too much and it, between the secretary of state, National Security adviser at the time, what you see is competing views about what this whole thing means, what is going on here because it was hard to understand. We have to remember, the word is law missed did not really even exist at the time. This whole idea of is like revolutionaries and fundamentalist was new. Host and one thing i want to follow up, as a historical point, it is striking to recall in historical terms what will the hostagetaking of the american diplomats played in resolving that internal power structure. In fact, that was a key moment at which that question in the balance which many more elected, democratic form of government and a harder line clerical form of government was resolved in favor of the clerics, in part because of the internal political success of taking the american hostages. They use that in a way it i think Many Americans would not be familiar with. Guest exactly, and that is another thing i wanted to examine. Quite naturally and understandably and rightly we look at the hostage crisis from an american viewpoint. How could they possibly violate all of these diplomatic laws and traditions by holding our diplomats hostage. People were understandably and quite rightly very exercised over this, but at the time people tended to pay less attention to how that factored into these internal conflicts of and the Iranian Revolutionary jean. As you say, very, very skillfully used the hostage crisis to undermine his secular liberal opponent, branding them as agents of america and trying to enshrine the principle of clerical rule, and from then on he had no serious challengers. Host that is striking. And just in terms of its presentday relevance, you make the point about, you know, being almost a key moment in the creation of modern political islamism as we know what. It sounds a lot like what is going on in egypt these days. Early and so what is going to happen in egypt and what did that tackling of hosni mubarak, we dont really know yet. Yo