Back in 1995, as he was readying himself for his attempt to get elected to the State Senate of Illinois, this youngish Chicago lawyer (and former community organizer!) joined us to discuss his new book and his attitudes toward various major matters. Having heard him on the air for this hour and a half discussion would you have predicted a “big public career” to come?  Frankly, it did not so strike me. But upon the guest’s departure the program’s producer, an otherwise calm, quite intelligent and slightly cynical recent Yale graduate, excitedly declared, “I don’t know where he’s going but I want to go there with him!!” How much of the Obama to come do you hear in this longish sample of the Obama that was?

One of the best analysts I know makes a point of never voting! That’s Robert Schmuhl, Chairman of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Insights about the current and rather disheartening political scene abound in any extended conversation with this clear-eyed fellow who keeps his distance (the better to see behind their masks) from the pols and their acolytes. And here is just such a conversation  in which a good time was had by two old friends, the one still learning from the other.

That was the sub-title of Bob Woodward’s book about William Casey, who ran the CIA as a war operation. Before Casey’s death in 1987 Woodward interviewed him deeply and fully – and shortly after that published this astonishing account and gave us this rather stunning discussion of the hidden history he had uncovered.

Here is a recent conversation recordedDaniel Pipes, the best expert by far on the seething and long-running anti-western turmoil in the Arab Middle East. But first some words of background.

Many American foreign affairs scholars classify themselves as of the school of “realism.” That supposedly means that they take inter-nation competition and distrust as always operative, potentially or actually.  A further premise is that struggles of that sort will persist until “victory” or exhaustion are reached. Nowhere is this overview of “international relations” more regnant than in the clusters of “Middle Eastern scholarship” found at many American universities.

Together with many hidden away in the State Department and more visible and audible in the American and West European print and electronic press, the prevailing view among such Middle East “experts” has been this: that murderous jihadism, in its many contemporary manifestations, was and is an inevitable reaction to the humiliation (originally colonialistic and then Israeli) to which the Arab nations and peoples have been subjected.  At their worst such intellectoid apologists have sometimes come close to implying that “tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.”

Compounding the offense is the increasingly evoked gambit (Edward Said may well have been its most prominent American academic exemplar) that the standard of “realism”  forces all explanation of the renascent barbarism of Al Queda  to be understood on this basis. That view is now often whispered – whether in academic, journalistic or governmental settings – about the new monstrosity of ISIS/ISIL.

Some well qualified scholars – trained in the American scholastic tradition but operating beyond its received “truths” – have provided a far more accurately realistic account of where and how modern jihadism came from, how it operates and how it may be countered, perhaps in a rather extended “twilight struggle.”

Foremost among such analysts is the redoubtable Daniel Pipes. His rejection by some of the entrenched academics is in fact testimony to his tremendously important contributions over the last 30 years as he provided a detailed and truly realistic account of what went wrong in the Middle East, and in Islam itself.

According to Richard Posner, a public intellectual uses general ideas drawn from history, philosophy and the sciences to analyze public problems and issues of general concern. George Orwell is an example of a great public intellectual, says Judge Posner – who goes on to argue that they don’t make them as they used to. In this vigorous conversation from 2002, Posner and Ron Grossman run through a large list of “intellectuals” who presume to explain – through their writing and broadcasting – what’s right, wrong and worth conserving or rejecting in contemporary society.