Liberty and Leadership
TFAS has reached 53,000 students and professionals through their academic programs, fellowships and seminars. Representing more than 140 countries, TFAS alumni are courageous leaders throughout the world – forging careers in politics, government, public policy, business, philanthropy, law and the media. Join TFAS President, Roger Ream, as he reconnects with these outstanding alumni to share experiences, swap career stories, and find out what makes their leadership journey unique. The Liberty and Leadership podcast is produced at Podville Media in Washington, D.C. If you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email at podcast@TFAS.org.
Liberty and Leadership
Why the 1960s Damaged the American Dream with Tim Goeglein
This week Roger welcomes Tim Goeglein, the vice president of external and government relations for Focus on the Family, a Christian ministry and nonprofit organization. They discuss how the cultural and moral shifts of the 1960s shaped many of the challenges American society faces today, how the seeds for these changes were planted earlier in the 20th century by progressives like Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey and how the Great Society programs of the 1960s (despite good intentions) led to unintended consequences that undermined traditional American societal institutions. Plus, why the path forward lies in grassroots efforts to rebuild civic institutions at the local level rather than relying on top-down government solutions.
Prior to joining Focus on the Family, Goeglein was a special assistant to President George W. Bush and deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, conducting outreach for conservative and faith-based groups. During his White House tenure, he played an integral role in nominating Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and John G. Roberts and was also integral in helping to establish the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
He’s written four books, his latest title being, “Stumbling Toward Utopia: How the 1960s Turned Into a National Nightmare and How We Can Revive the American Dream,” which was published in September of 2024 by Fidelis Publishing.
The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS president Roger Ream and produced by Podville Media. If you have a comment or question for the show, please email us at podcast@TFAS.org. To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.
Escape to sunny Naples, florida, for the Fund for American Studies annual conference this spring, from March 6th to the 8th. Enjoy stunning beaches and luxurious surroundings while you learn from inspiring speakers such as Ari Fleischer, former White House Press Secretary, and Kyle Mann, editor-in-chief of the Babylon Bee. Join us for engaging discussions, networking and a chance to shape the next generation of courageous leaders. The conference takes place March 6th through the 8th at the Naples Grand. That's tfasorg slash Naples. Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty and friends who are making an impact. Today I'm your host, roger Reed.
Speaker 1:I'm pleased to welcome Timothy Gagline, the Vice President of External and Government Relations at Focus on the Family, a Christian ministry and nonprofit organization. Prior to this role, tim was special assistant to President George W Bush and Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, conducting outreach to conservative and faith-based organizations. During his White House tenure, tim played an integral role in the nominations of Justices Samuel Olito and John Roberts to the United States Supreme Court, and he helped establish the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives at the White House. In 2011, tim wrote a memoir of his experiences in the Bush administration and since then has written three more books. His most recent title is Stumbling Toward Utopia how the 1960s Turned into a National Nightmare and how we Can Revive the American Dream. It was published in September of 2024 by Fidelis Publishing Tim. Thank you for joining me today.
Speaker 2:It's a real pleasure, Roger. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Before we discuss your most recent book, I'd like to ask you what motivated you to begin writing books a few years ago. This, I think, is at least your fourth book. What got you into writing and put you on this path?
Speaker 2:Well, I love that question.
Speaker 2:When I departed the White House, a former White House colleague of mine had had a previous professional relationship with a very important conservative Christian publisher and she asked me at lunch one day have you ever thought about writing a memoir not an autobiography, but just a sense of a combination of two things One, your work in the White House and in the United States Senate and how you came into the conservative movement and some of the ideas, the books, the, above all, the people who had an influence on you. And candidly I said to her I hadn't thought about it. But she said I think you should. And within two weeks I signed a book deal and thus was born out of that the man in the Middle, which is my first book, a memoir which turned out, by God's grace alone, to have done very, very well, and especially in the reflections of the conservatives and faith-based aspects of my time working for George W Bush. So that's really how it started. And now it's four books later and it's actually a lot of work and a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have a copy of that first book of yours, the man in the Middle, subtitled An Inside Account of Faith and Politics in the George W Bush Era. So congratulations on the success of that first book. Another question, just kind of by way of introductory part to this conversation, is kind of how you go about writing the books. I mean, you hold down regular employment. Do you block a few weeks to write? Do you get up early and do it every day? Do you focus on the weekends? But how do you tackle the writing? Do you have a routine?
Speaker 2:My teacher of history at Indiana University, now deceased, robert Farrell, one of the great diplomatic historians of American history and most well-known as Harry Truman's official biographer.
Speaker 2:I really benefited from his friendship and mentorship, roger, all those years ago in Bloomington, and I remember having a long afternoon with him numerous years ago in which I asked him with specific kind of detail how do you write a book? And he had been Sam Bemis' star student at Yale all the years before and had patterned his research and writing after Professor Bemis. I remember coming back from that afternoon meeting and taking extensive notes on what I had recalled and I've copied that method, and the method is quite simple, which is read all the time, read every opportunity you have, find a fleet way of making outlines that are discernible and applicable and then begin to grow from that a chapter outline and proposal. It's an involved process, but it's one that really has served me quite well, particularly in the third and fourth book, where it really did take a fairly monumental research effort, because the areas that I was writing about were very heavily researched already and I wanted to find something new to say.
Speaker 1:Well, that certainly shows in those books and you document some of those sources you went to for that research and it was some great sources there. One more question before we tackle your latest book Stumbling Toward Utopia In 2023, I believe it was you published Toward a More Perfect Union the Moral and Cultural Case for Teaching the Great American Story. In that book you discussed, among other things, the need to educate Americans, young Americans, all Americans really about their own history, the American story. How was that book received?
Speaker 2:Very well and in fact, of the four books that I have written or co-authored, that particular book arrived, you may remember, roger, at a moment of the height of Wokistan, erasure culture, cancel culture and frankly, when I began the research on it I was certainly very interested and concerned about cancel culture, but at that particular moment it really wasn't kind of in the national forefront.
Speaker 2:But it was a remarkable moment that toward a more perfect union, came out at precisely the height of the debate over DEI, wokistan, etc. You sort of strike, pay dirt if you're an author where something you've been thinking about and writing about actually happens, at a moment where everybody left, right and center seems to be speaking about it, writing about it, etc. I think for that reason toward a more perfect union, which really went in, as you know, to some length about what are the implications of national cultural illiteracy. It really struck a chord and I wanted to pick up on that chord and advance it in Stumbling Toward Utopia argues that many of the ills we're suffering today are due to events that can be traced back to the 1960s.
Speaker 1:But you admittedly don't offer just a simplistic overview of these things. You dig into the antecedents to those events the influence of the progressives in Woodrow Wilson, of John Dewey on our educational system and many others that had influences that were felt in the 1960s. Could you please summarize the overall theme of Stumbling Toward Utopia?
Speaker 2:I'd love to. I was actually speaking in behalf of Focus on the Family, where I've been a vice president here in Washington, believe it or not for 16 years, and I was in a debate in Tulsa, oklahoma. Roger, you're out and about speaking all the time as well and you offer remarks and then we get to what we call the Q&A and, with pinpoint predictability, for the three years in this particular period of time, before I began writing, researching, stumbling Toward Utopia, with pinpoint predictability, whether I was in front of a left-wing audience, right-wing audience or non-ideological, somebody would invariably ask the question how did we get into this mess? And in other parts of American history you would say tell me more about what you're asking. But in the era that we're in, we all know it's a mess, a cultural mess.
Speaker 2:And after hearing this question repeatedly, got on the airplane and I asked for a short stack of cocktail napkins and I began to outline the answer to how we got into this mess. And the answer to the mess I came to conclude was the cultural and moral cataclysm and revolution of the 1960s. If you want to ask the question, how did we get into this mess? You can really get a lot of the answer from what happened to our country culture and civilization in the 60s and the 1970s, and so I organically asked where did the 60s come from? And the answer is stumbling toward utopia and what it all means for those of us living in 21st century America.
Speaker 1:Well, it's really hard to believe that the decade of the 60s is more than six decades ago, having come of age as the 60s were passing, and experiencing some of that as a teenager. In the book you do go into. Some of the antecedents that led us to the 60s Could begin in the 60s.
Speaker 2:The 60s began at the turn of the 20th century and it took the seeds of social engineering and utopianism planted in the turn of the 20th century to germinate in the 1960s, For instance in the area of politics and public policy. President Woodrow Wilson he had been the president of Princeton, he had been governor of New Jersey, he was a real social engineer and he was very uncomfortable with the United States and the United States government. He wrote at length about his uncomfortability with the Declaration of Independence, his uncomfortability with the United States Constitution, and he really reimagined himself as kind of the American prime minister, changing politics really forever and really using progressivism as the seedbed of that kind of radical transformation. Roger Baldwin, a very influential founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, a committed communist, very uncomfortable with the American law and legal system. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, a very committed eugenicist, a racialist, really uncomfortable in writing very demeaning things about the American immigrant class.
Speaker 2:And of course, John Dewey, overwhelmingly the most transformative, progressive social engineering pioneer of American education, forever changing the idea of the objective nature of wisdom and virtue as the seedbed of American education. And many others. But this group of people fundamentally changing and pushing forward what would become the sexual revolution, the education revolution, the real revolution, in a bad sense, for the American government and legal system. In many ways, these were the progenitors of the 1960s.
Speaker 1:The thing they seemed to have in common was the idea that we could tap the expertise of elites and that would trump our traditional Republican form of government, where power came up from the people and they elected their representatives to govern them. You present that very effectively and John Dewey is an example of that in your book. I was surprised. I knew about Dewey and his belief system and his effort to transform our educational system, but you include the quotes here where he admittedly said he wanted to really change the social order and the culture in our society.
Speaker 2:In fact two comments, if I may. John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson actually have a lot in common To your earlier comment, Roger. As you know from Stumbling Toward Utopia, there's that remarkable observation from Woodrow Wilson that the American experience really would be better you know, much better if we just have the country run by experts. This is really in opposition to the founding principle of citizen sovereignty. And, of course, like Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, as you say, really intentionally wanted to upend the idea of American education, using the classroom and eventually using higher education to really transform the country. And as you know from the book I showed the direct line from Dewey's radicalism all the way down to the Port Huron statement, which is really the 60s blueprint for the radicalization of American higher education, and using American higher education as a kind of truncheon against the country to radically transform the country.
Speaker 2:And I think that, whether you're speaking about Sanger or Dewey, Wilson, Baldwin, many of the people that I outlined in Stumbling Forward Utopia you come to the conclusion, ultimately, that they have in common this Forward Utopia. You come to the conclusion, ultimately, that they have in common this utopian vision for the United States that we can just socially engineer our way to a new country. And when we get to the 60s and 70s, you have to ultimately conclude, and not categorically. I'm a bottomless optimist and I say a lot of great things about the 1960s, but in this regard, the fundamental shift definitely goes into full force in the 60s and the 70s.
Speaker 1:Well, a little later we'll try to pull out that optimism that you have. So we'll get to that. But let's still focus on the negative here, and you mentioned the Port Huron statement, which was really the precursor to the founding of the SDS Students for a Democratic Society, and Tom Hayden and other radicals who launched the protest movement. What's interesting there I found in reading your book, tim, is while Dewey and to some extent Wilson and others saying or were explicit in their aims, hayden worked to try to disguise those aims and you cover that very well, I thought, in the book.
Speaker 2:The Port Huron statement is something that not just conservatives but everybody who cares deeply about public policy and culture and the way they interact the world of ideas.
Speaker 2:We owe it to ourselves to go back and to not only read the Port Huron statement I pray that people will read Stumbling Forward Utopia but to really better understand this very specific connection between ideas and consequences. A now forgotten conservative philosopher who was at the University of Chicago, richard Weaver, famously wrote, said, lectured, that ideas have consequences. Our mutual friend Bill Buckley used to say only ideas have consequences and both Weaver and Buckley were right. And I think that Tom Hayden and many of the progressives who had a completely different worldview than Weaver and Buckley, rehm and Geiglein, ultimately comes to the view they were echoing a lot of what our fellow conservatives believe that ideas have consequences. And using the university in a new way, along those Dewey-esque Woodrow Wilson lines, really helped to fundamentally transform not only American education at every level, to fundamentally transform not only American education at every level but also American culture, politics, the legal system and, frankly, entertainment and journalism. And the Port Huron Statement for that reason really deserves to be better understood, internalized and absorbed, because it's a very important historic document.
Speaker 1:Tim, many of the chapters in your book clearly relate to culture, the ones that deal with entertainment, the sexual revolution, education. But one chapter that particularly struck me was your chapter on Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. While not necessarily considering government programs to be impacting the culture, you show how they did have a tremendous impact by quoting from Lyndon Johnson's speech in May of 1964. Could you talk some about that chapter?
Speaker 2:I think that the Great Society is, if I may say, the penultimate beginning of the disaster that became the 1960s. In preparation for writing Stumbling Towards Utopia, roger, I went back and I read all of Lyndon Johnson's major speeches. I went back to his news conferences and read the remarks and comments regarding the Great Society. They're voluminous. The president, in May of 1964, goes to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and launches the Great Society and it's unbelievable, I would say it's breathtaking to read that speech and many that follow, in this kind of Herculean, olympian sense of what government is going to do. These promises are unbelievable and you can read these speeches and watch them and what comes to mind is Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. You know this kind of progressive preparation for the 1960s and the over government, the explosion of government. What does Lyndon Johnson promise? He promises that government is going to solve poverty. Government is going to resolve all of our inner city issues. Government is going to solve the race issue. Government is going to be involved in education. Government is going to be involved in the family and, as conservatives know, the more that government incentivizes something, very often the more they get it. And the Great Society, overwhelmingly, is the stumbling toward utopia, public policy of cataclysm. Here it is only 2025 and poverty is worse. The marriage and fertility rates in our country are the lowest in recorded American history. And you go on and on and you go back and look at the great society and you actually empirically not from opinions, but you empirically measure it and you have to conclude that it was really a gigantic, a gargantuan, colossal failure of big over-government. And so I thought it was very important to really spend time looking at the great society.
Speaker 2:Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a big supporter in his life of Franklin Roosevelt. Avril Harrowman, the ultimate New Deal Democrat. He was a little-known demographer in the 1960s this is only 1965. And in 1965, he said and found that 25% of Black Americans were born out of wedlock. He called it a crisis. Today that number is above 70% 53% of Hispanic Americans, 33% of native-born whites. The majority of babies born to women ages 30 years of age and over are born out of wedlock. So this is unsustainable and it's incentivized by the progressive programs and the idea of the 60s and 70s. And so I think we're honor-bound to look at where this kind of moral and social revolution really came from and what it means.
Speaker 1:There's a common understanding that history often repeats itself, Tim, and would you say there are any major cultural shifts happening right now in America that may impact us in six decades or maybe sooner? Do you see promising signs from this decade that might give us hope for the future?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm an inveterate optimist and, I have to say, if I were to write the next book, I would be very tempted to talk Roger at some length, to write at some length about what I consider to be a lot of the remarkably positive developments in culture and public policy. For instance, I think we are seeing a new dawn for school choice. I think it's quite exciting. I think we are seeing a parallel series of good news stories about charter schools, about homeschooling and private and religious education. In other words, this idea that a kind of Germanic 19th century model that the progressives tried to toy around with, I think we can pretty much say now is not working for anybody.
Speaker 2:And I think that the way forward in education, there are all kinds of excellent signs. I also think, in the world of entertainment and culture, both high culture, middle brow, popular culture, I think we are again seeing fairly good films, we are seeing good television. With the social media explosion we have seen a remarkable array of excellent choices and I think that the model of three networks and two newspapers and a handful of radio stations is yesterday's news and the decentralization, the kind of, I think, counterculture that American conservatives have advocated for many, many years. So I believe that, in the main, remarkable days are ahead for our great country, and in the best sort of way.
Speaker 1:You have a chapter in your book about the decline in mainline Protestantism in our country, which was dramatic beginning in the 50s, really in the 60s, and continued up to this day. Do you see encouraging signs in that regard? Is there a need for a religious revival in this country and if yes, do you see it happening? I know you work in that field, so I'm interested in your opinions of that.
Speaker 2:I actually believe that we will see a fourth great awakening and in Stumbling Toward Utopia, I show the direct results of the progressive overtake of much of what we used to call the Protestant mainline. Incredibly excellent, positive force for good in our country. It served as a complementary nature, even from the founding, to what we all consider to be good, healthy public policy and culture. But in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, culminating in the 60s and 70s, as I demonstrate in the book, we show the complete progressive overtake of the overwhelming majority of what we used to call, as I say, the Protestant mainline Presbyterians, methodists, etc. Etc. And in almost every instance where progressivism and social justice replaces, broadly speaking, biblical orthodoxy, you have not just a small decline, you have a hollowing out of that part of the American religious experience.
Speaker 2:Now it's important to say that, even though the seminaries and many of those churches have lost historic numbers of members in many ways, on Sunday mornings or Wednesday nights really there's not very many people there. We also have to say that because of earlier faith and the commitment of people in those parishes, churches, places of worship, they are very large property holders. So you drive through most cities and you see these churches, and many of them in great locations, seminaries as well, but they're simply failing. And that doesn't mean that's an end to the American faith community, quite the opposite. We see major uptick in more low church denominational evangelical, orthodox, catholic, eastern Orthodoxy and Orthodox Judaism. So the Judeo-Christian experience in America, I think, is alive and well and I think we will actually begin to see a growth in the next generation.
Speaker 1:Many of the solutions you call for in your final chapter in the book rest with Americans as individuals who can bring about change, not by looking to government but by engaging in their communities, their churches, as you were just talking about, in schools, businesses. You suggest ways to revive the American dream and restore civility and unity in our country. I picked up some words just to quote directly from you. You suggest we quote work to build consensus, build bridges and show respect Engage, not disengage. How do you think that can happen? Or do you think it can?
Speaker 2:Well, I do think it can and in fact just before Christmas I was speaking at a very well-known, very elite New England liberal arts college and I tried something there which I was speaking at a very well-known, very elite New England liberal arts college and I tried something there which is I was warned that I was going to be speaking before a substantial size of young progressives who would rip apart my worldview, and I decided to echo stumbling toward utopia and to talk about the importance of local churches and local faith life, our neighborhoods, our communities. I spoke about regeneration, renewal, restoration at the most local and organic level, suggesting that if we really want an American restoration, that it's not going to come from kind of Washington downward, silicon Valley downward, wall Street downward, hollywood downward, that it was going to begin at the most organic, local, regional, statewide level and build its way up. And I was overwhelmed with the number of so-called young progressives who came up to me afterward and said that's what we want. They talk at length about wanting to be married, they want to have children, but they say they're concerned about the economy, they're concerned about their ability to buy a home, they want continuity, they want stability, but they're also risk takers and I thought to myself that's the American dream.
Speaker 2:And so I do believe that the way forward is not by reflecting back on the 1930s, 40s, 50s and say we need to go back to this, we need to go back to this. You know I'm a conservative. It's a new era and we have to find the way forward. It's about what's ahead and I feel very confident that in the rising generation of young Americans we have young people of goodwill who are impatient for all the right things. They've lived through an enormous amount of brokenness and kind of what I would say inverted reality and I think they want the way forward. And the more that we can talk about merit, the more that we can talk about excellence, the more that we can, I think, pragmatically appeal rightfully to civility, good order. I think these are things where we will find a lot of resonance, even with people who may see the world quite differently than we do.
Speaker 1:As you know, at the Fund for American Studies, we devote a lot of attention and resources to working with young people who are going into journalism, both at collegiate students who are working on campus papers with young professionals as well. I'm curious you started your career, as I recall, in journalism. Do you have any particular advice, since you speak to a lot of college students, that's tailored particularly to young people who are interested in careers in journalism?
Speaker 2:I absolutely do. I remember, roger, almost a year ago, being on a panel at a large state university and it was gloom and doom. It was all about the end of American journalism. And what I found in this particular session was that the people who were my interlocutors and the ones who firmly disagreed with me were really looking at an old journalism model, that they were sort of missing the day of an editor who fully wielded much of the influence in a local community. They were lament of missing the day of an editor who fully wielded much of the influence in a local community. They were lamenting the end of what they called gatekeepers and guardrails in journalism.
Speaker 2:And I thought to myself that might be a particular moment in American journalism you know sort of the 1950s, 60s, 70s but it's not the moment and the way forward for American journalism To ring the bell backwards. I think this is a fabulous era going forward for young journalists. I think social media and the world of the new American journalism has created wonderful opportunity after opportunity. When I was growing up as a conservative in the Midwest, we used to run every two weeks to the mailbox to get National Review or Human Events, trying to sort of cling on to this kind of rarity of conservative journalism. That's not necessary now in any way, shape or form, and I think it's far beyond Fox News or the Wall Street Journal editorial page or National Review they're all terrific, by the way. I really mean that.
Speaker 2:But I think there are limitless numbers of opportunities for young, bright, smart journalists who want to go out and tell a good story, and I actually think that there are excellent ways now to be involved at a much younger age to get the kind of training you need to be an excellent editor or writer what we used to call correspondent and opinion journalism. I think opinion journalism is more important now than ever and I really do not believe that we are polarized ultimately in our country because we're somehow on either side of a predictable journalistic bright line. I think conservatives of goodwill want to know what the left thinks and I I think conservatives of goodwill want to know what the left thinks, and I think progressives of goodwill want to know what people on the right think. I don't believe that people of goodwill, left and right, are somehow unable to communicate with each other anymore. So I think the future is bright and I hope we will have an incredibly large number of young, bright, smart conservatives in the rising generation going into and choosing journalism.
Speaker 1:About a year and a half ago, started a student journalism association. We have over 400 collegiate journalists who are members of that, who are trying to educate and train, and we're sponsoring over 20 independent college newspapers that are doing exactly what you're saying trying to report, be correspondents. Get the facts out. I know we're up against our time limit. I think we gave a general idea of what Stumbling Ford Utopia is about. We touched in more detail on some of the chapters and themes in there. Congratulations, tim, on this book. Do you have another one coming out anytime soon?
Speaker 2:I do. Indeed, I'm going to be doing a fifth book, which will come out in early 2026. And its theme is Marriage, Family, Parenting, Human Life, Religious Liberty, Conscience Rights and the Pronoun Debate.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay. Well, we'll look forward to seeing that when you finish it and it gets published. Thanks so much for joining the Liberty and Leadership Podcast today, tim.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Roger, and the Fund for American Studies is matchless. I love everything you do and it's a real honor to have been with you. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast. If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfasorg, and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five-star review. Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media. I'm your host, roger Ream, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.
