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Aug. 7, 2021 - The Charlie Kirk Show
50:10
Great American Story: A Land of Hope with Dr. Wilfred M. McClay (Part 1)
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Hillsdale College Partnership 00:04:08
Hey everybody, happy Saturday.
We are thrilled to announce our new partnership with Hillsdale College, the beacon of the north, the place where truth is taught and our country is honored.
When I visit Hillsdale College, I love to see they had statues of Frederick Douglass, George Washington, and my man Winston Churchill.
So we have a new partnership with them, and you guys should go to charlieforhillsdale.com.
That's charlieforhillsdale.com.
So Charlie for Hillsdale, but for is spelled, not the number four.
And you'll be able to register for the online courses.
I take the courses every day.
They are substantive, they're beautiful, they're entertaining, and they are fulfilling.
So you go to charlieforhillsdale.com, check it out.
And so every Saturday for the foreseeable future, we're going to be diving into these ideas with experts from Hillsdale College about the most important issues of the day and how they translate historically and philosophically.
With us today is Dr. McClay from Hillsdale College and University of Oklahoma.
He is the author of the best textbook you can get your hands on, Land of Hope, The Great American Story.
And again, you can find that at charlieforhillsdale.com.
Are you afraid your children are not learning proper U.S. history?
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This conversation is a great starting point, and so are the Hillsdale online courses.
And so I know a lot of you email us, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Charlie, what do I do?
My kids are being propagandized.
Get them in front of these online courses.
Encourage them to take them.
Take them yourself.
You'll appreciate your country even more.
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My conversation brought to you by our sponsorship with the Beacon of the North, the place where truth is taught, and it's America's last college, Hillsdale College.
Buckle up, everybody.
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That's why we are here.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
We are just thrilled today to have with us Dr. McClay, who, in my opinion, is one of the most important thought leaders when it comes to teaching American history in our country.
This is, of course, part of our partnership with Hillsdale College, as Hugh Hewitt calls it, the Beacon of the North, where you can find this course and all things Hillsdale at charlieforhillsdale.com.
Dr. McClay, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Charlie, it's my pleasure to be with you.
Fighting for Freedom on Campuses 00:12:40
Well, so I want to get into the specifics of the course and also the book that accompanies it.
So the course, I believe, is called Great American Story, but it's based off of the book Land of Hope, which I have been recommending to parents and teachers ever since I heard you talk about it with Dr. Arne and Hugh Hewitt.
But I want to talk about something that's a little bit broader and ask this question.
Why are stories so essential to human beings?
Why is it important that we tell stories properly in order to create good citizens?
Well, those are actually two different questions, but the stories, it's the way we understand how things came to be as they are.
You can use a word, a sort of analytic category, descriptive word to say, how did things come this way?
It evolved.
It developed.
But if you tell a story, first there was this, and then there was this, and then this happened, and the response to it meant we had to do this, and so on and so forth.
And the end result is we have the situation that we now see before us.
To tell a story is the only way to get at that.
You know, why are all the men in your family firemen?
Just as a hypothetical.
Well, it all started with Uncle Charlie long ago, who did this and that, that, that, and it was passed down this way.
Everything in our lives as individuals, our lives in groups, our lives in the country is embedded some way in the passage of time and the way events condition what we do next.
So you have to do it.
Stories are the way we make sense of things.
They're the way that we, you know, you can't, it's funny.
Have you ever noticed how you can't remember facts if they're just isolated factoids?
But if you put them into a story, all of a sudden they make sense.
Our faculty of memory really works through stories, through narratives.
So one reason we fret so much about, you know, when we talk about the news, about the narrative, a lot of times that exists in advance of the way that the facts are being reported.
And that's bad.
That's bad.
But it shows that there's a human need for stories as a way to make sense of things.
So it seems to me.
So when we historians stop telling stories, people stop reading us, stop paying attention.
And so it seems today that there's this big debate over what story are we telling.
For example, some people from the New York Times might say that we want to tell the story that America was founded in 1619, for example.
What is the story that you tell in this phenomenal course, The Great American Story, Land of Hope?
Is it one that obviously it's accurate, but what are you trying to achieve as you go through this?
What is the story you're trying to tell?
Well, I think what I've tried to do is to strike a balance between a sort of uncritical celebration of the country, which I don't think we want to do.
We know we have faults.
We know that we know those faults are things that we have to correct.
And some of them are faults of longstanding.
So it doesn't do to forget them and think they'll go away.
But it doesn't do young people.
Doesn't do any of us a service to present America as a villain when, in fact, we've been one of the greatest benefactor nations in human history.
We've taken in people from all over the world, allowed them to become Americans, allowed them to become wealthy, allowed them to become influential, accepted them as exemplary Americans.
There's no other nation in history that has had the capacity to do that.
That's why everybody wants to come here.
I mean, if we were so bad, how would you explain that?
They somehow they never do.
So I think that there is a kind of radiant ideal that we at our best have represented better than any other nation in certainly in modern history, if not all of human history.
And that we have failings, we have flaws, we have the debilities to which all human beings are liable.
But comparatively, and this is something I think we need to do more of in teaching American history, remind people of what the alternatives are.
If you compare America to perfection, we're always going to fall short.
But if you compare America to other countries, then the picture looks a whole lot different.
So in terms of real-world alternatives, we're pretty great.
And so you ask this question in the first course where you say, why do we study history?
Why do we engage in this vexing, awful, difficult task in which the reconstruction of the past is endlessly fascinating, but endlessly elusive?
Why especially, and I hear this all the time from my students, why do we study history today when we're living in an era that is so unprecedented in human history?
So why do we study history?
Yeah, yeah.
Because nothing is completely unprecedented.
I mean, I don't believe that history repeats itself.
You know, Mark Twain said it rhymes, and maybe there's something to that.
But no, history is a kind of record of basically unrepeatable things.
So why?
But we do look for patterns in history.
I like to say history is the only laboratory we have for judging good ideas and bad ideas, for figuring out how people are likely to behave in certain circumstances.
So look at the past.
Look at what's happened.
It's not a controlled scientific experience.
It never can be.
That's all we've got.
So it's up to us to mine it as best we can.
And certainly with the needs of the present and the future in mind, but also for its own sake.
I think his studying history broadens us.
It makes us larger.
It makes our souls larger because we learn about other people, other ways of life, other times, even in our own country, and learn to think ourselves into those situations, into other people's minds, other people's experiences.
That's a good thing.
That's something that, as I say, makes the soul larger and makes us more aware.
This can only be good.
And I think Cicero has a saying that if you never learn about the things that happened before you were born, then you will remain always a child.
And that's the condition.
Somebody for whom everything's unprecedented is somebody who doesn't know anything about anything else that ever happened.
They're a child.
You know, human nature is not very different, if at all different, from what it was in Cicero's time.
So, we're still dealing with the same crooked timber of humanity, trying to do the best we can with that crooked timber.
And one reason that we Americans should always go back with gratitude to our Constitution is that it is a scheme that works with the crooked timber.
It takes that into account, all the things that we are prone to do and makes a good result out of it.
That's so beautifully said.
So, I want to ask, and I think it's a great transition, as you mentioned, Cicero.
The idea of the West.
I first came across the idea that the West was bad when I was speaking at Stanford University, and someone said, Western civilization is one of colonialism and oppression and misogyny and homophobia.
I said, What are you talking about?
So, Dr. McClay, what is the West?
Is it just a place on the map?
Is it what ideas influenced it?
The floor is yours.
Well, you can go back a long way because if you go back to antiquity, there was always this notion, and you see it in the idea of the Elysian fields and the Garden of Eden, and of there being a place in the West, in the land where the sun sets.
And I mean, in Europe, especially this idea, where there were fields of redemption.
It was like a new Eden, a new Zion, a place where the human race would be redeemed.
And that was one of the things that drew explorers West, if not the only thing, but it was definitely part of their interest in the West.
And the first colonizing efforts kind of mapped themselves onto that template, that idea of the West is a land of redemption.
So, you see, in the Puritans, for example, in the 17th century, you know, not the earliest, but the next earliest settlers, they thought of the new world as a land where a pure church,
purifying of the corruptions that it had suffered, could be reestablished and a pure form of worship and a more virtuous way of living could be established.
And that's what they tried to do in God help us, Boston.
You know, utopian efforts generally fail, but American history is full of them.
You know, that's one of the meanings of it being a land of hope.
People have come here always with the idea that you are not condemned to be to live your life entirely in the conditions you were born into.
You know, you're not condemned to that.
That's not your ticket, it is not stamped at birth.
You can make something, as we say, make something of yourself.
And the land of hope is the place where those possibilities are there, not certainties.
The land of hope is full of all kinds of failures or disappointments, as any enterprising society is.
You know, the best businessmen will tell you with this kind of a saying in Silicon Valley now that the only way you really develop is through failure.
Failure is not a bad word among some of these people.
And I think that's a great, I know there's a lot about Self-Bandaley I don't like, but I like that.
That idea that you try things, it doesn't work.
Okay, you try something else.
We're an experimental people in that way.
But we don't believe that we should be condemned to the conditions of our birth.
And that's a big difference between us and the old world that so many of our immigrants through our history have come from.
And so, as the West continued to develop and grow, can you just give us some background of the thinkers and the ideas that laid the framework for this land of hope?
Should we go all the way back to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle?
What are the ideas of the natural law and where reason incorporated and the idea of self-evident truths?
Because it seems as if that's a missing component at times when we teach history to young people.
Well, you know, the founders were our founders were such extraordinary men.
And they were basically, I think the average age is like 45, something like that.
They're very young to be so wise.
And one of the things that made them wise is they'd read Socrates, Plato, Cicero, all that stuff.
And they were marinated in the classics, but they also had read the most up-to-date, you know, they'd read John Locke, they'd read Rousseau and Machiavelli.
Religion and the American Revolution 00:04:05
You know, John Adams was quite taken with Machiavelli.
I mean, he hated him, but he couldn't talk about him.
Stop talking about him.
So they were well read.
I would not call them intellectuals, though, because if an intellectual is somebody who sort of studies ideas in order to just feed on ideas and spew out more words, that was not them.
They fed on ideas as a blueprint for action.
So they were always looking at the constitutions of republics in Renaissance Italy with a view towards what does this tell me about what a republic can be, what the requirements to be a republic, what the vulnerabilities of a republic, how we can create a republic, a place where the people rule and don't have a king, but the people rule.
Where can we find the blueprint for that?
So they looked everywhere.
And someone like Jefferson was, of course, very influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, which would include Bloc and Rousseau and others.
And there were English Whig writers who some of whom were quite radical in opposing the monarchy that they were influenced by.
I would also add, I think it's very important that this wasn't an influence with Jefferson, but it was with most of the others, religion.
It was a colonial and revolutionary era of America was a very religious society.
It was a kind of Protestantism that was not, it embraced a lot of different denominations, definitely Protestant.
Catholicism was a very, very marginal influence at the time of the founding.
But they thought, they felt, and this is what surprises people, they go back, is that they did not see any conflict between science and religion.
So they saw Enlightenment and revivalism or religious enthusiasm going hand in hand.
So the revolution was defended on secular grounds and on religious grounds.
And both were present, both sets of influences.
I think just to come back to your actual question about the influences of different thinkers, I think the ideas of Christianity, the notion of human equality under God,
The idea that the you know the freedom of the will, uh, the um and the notion that that of the improvability of the human condition by our own efforts.
Um, all of these have secular and religious roots.
It's fascinating, they did not see um a conflict there by and large.
You know, Jefferson was not very warmly disposed to religion, I admit that, but um, but he favored freedom of religion, not the abolition of religion.
So, I count him a brother in that.
Uh, uh, and almost everything that Jefferson stood for uh, in that line has endured.
So, in the Great American Story, and again, it's charlieforhillsdale.com, or you could dive deep into these ideas and also find other courses as well that I have taken.
I took Dr. Arne's Introduction to Aristotle, which was awesome, and the introduction to Constitution class, um, and also the history of the introduction to Western philosophy is really a phenomenal course.
And I tell people that if you dedicate time to this, no different than you dedicate time running on a treadmill, you will understand what's happening in the world better.
And Hillsdale has done such a phenomenal job with that.
Why Colonists Became Americans 00:14:46
So, I want to ask you about the genesis of the American Revolution.
The Great Awakening happened before that.
Dr. Arne would point to, I think, 1766, the end of the French-Indian War, as kind of the beginning of the rumblings of the American Revolution.
The American Revolution was obviously significant worldwide, and we count 1776 as our birthday.
Can you talk about what was happening leading up to the American Revolution?
Um, yeah, the context of that, and this is a good example, Charlie, of how you have to tell this as a story, uh, because if you don't do it that way, it's just not going to work, it's not you're not going to understand anything.
Look, the French and Indian War was an instance in which the conflict ended up with the French basically being booted out of North America.
So, the colonists, the English colonists, didn't have to fight with them anymore or deal with them.
But the problem was that it was a very expensive war for England to fight, and they bore the expense of it.
And so, when it was over, you know, a lot of people felt, and understandably, hey, you know, these colonists need to pay some of the freight on this.
So, the problem was how to do it.
The colonies all had their own assemblies, they had developed self-government.
You know, they've been in business over 100 years at this point, many of them, most of them.
And so, they had their own way of doing things and they raised taxes through their own legislatures.
That was the principle, you know, that that's how you raise taxes.
So, the idea of paying taxes to parliament didn't make any sense.
And yet, it's a fair point.
The British had to figure out a way to get the colonists to pay some of the expense for their own defense.
So, that's how it really started: is this conflict over what it was a settled way of life that we enjoyed in the colonies and the British effort to kind of tighten the screws on the empire so that they could extract some of the growing wealth of the colonies?
A sidebar here: the British had a different approach to colonization than the other great powers, the Spanish, the French.
They just kind of gave people a charter and said, go to it.
They didn't try to exercise centralized control.
And that's one reason the English colonies flourished is because they didn't have the heavy hand of government holding them back.
They could develop in their own ways.
They could profit from their own ventures instead of having to pay it all back to the mother country.
So that was now up for grabs after the French and Indian War and when this protracted period from 1763 to 1776, it sort of one effort after another by the Brits to think of something.
And the colonists say, no, no, like the old Holland Oates song, I can't go for that.
They can't go for that.
So it became more and more fractious.
But here's the reason I tell the story this way is that much as we love the Declaration of Independence, rightly so, and it is part of our identity.
Most Americans saw the revolution not as something radically new, but as a restoration.
That is, of their rights, their rights as Englishmen were to govern themselves, to tax themselves, to be judged by juries of their peers.
They picked all this up from English law.
These were not Enlightenment ideas.
They were ideas way back early in the tradition.
So the colonists saw themselves as Englishmen who happened to be living across the pond, but they were still Englishmen, very proud of that.
And to be an Englishman meant that you had the rights of an Englishman.
So they felt that Parliament and the king were taking those rights away.
And that's a big, big element of what the revolution was about.
Yes, we did have an element that Jefferson really was very influential around the world with the language of the Declaration of Independence, with the idea that our rights come not from government, but from God and nature's God, and therefore they can't be taken away by any human being.
And it's a responsibility of government to protect those rights.
And when it doesn't, time for a change.
So that's all part of the mix, too.
But there's a kind of radicals element, but there's also what I would call a conservative element in the American Revolution.
It's a radically conservative revolution.
And so, Dr. McClay, what I want to ask you is it wasn't just the train of abuses from King George.
People have been abused for a long time.
There was something else that was happening that made the founders say no.
What was happening in the background and in the literature and in the conversations or the intellectual development or the religious development that made the founders say no and have the courage and the clarity to do so?
Well, I think it was this combination.
There were definitely ideas.
I mentioned the radical Whig theorists who are not as well known as Locke and Jefferson.
But I think what it boils down to is a fear that they were going to lose their liberties, that little by little they would become enslaved.
And they used the language of slavery, ironically, because the institution of slavery was growing.
At the time of the revolution, every state, every colony, every state permitted slavery.
Everyone, Massachusetts, a lot of them got rid of it almost immediately, but that was creeping in.
So, there's a funny irony in their use of that term, but that's the way they saw it.
And they knew about the Spanish colonies, which had been virtually sort of, if not enslaved, they were just sort of outposts of government power.
They were not real settlements.
And the English came and they really settled.
They really made their homes and developed little Englands.
You know, there's a reason why so many things in what we call New England are named New Canaan, New York.
All these places are named after English towns and cities.
And the intention was to try to replicate the English way of life.
And now here comes the British government saying, no, we're going to impose taxes on you without representation, without your being represented in parliament by people you elect.
And, you know, there were no Concord jets at that time to transport people back and forth to represent the colonies.
So it was a real problem.
It was not a problem soluble within the constraints of the time.
Interestingly, if it all had happened in the 21st century, there might not have been the same issue.
But that's really it, Charlie.
I think at the bottom, there are a lot of ideas about, particularly about republicanism, that is, the people governing themselves without a monarch.
But they were used to governing themselves.
They were used to that.
That's what they did in the colonies.
And this imposition of the power of the crown in parliament on their everyday lives, which by the way was mostly unsuccessful.
I mean, the Boston Tea Party is indicative about, you know, they didn't succeed in any of these imposts.
None of them brought in any revenue and they stirred up trouble.
British officials were pretty stupid and mulish during this time.
And it was that there were a lot of Americans, so this is something else that's kind of poignant to know.
There are a lot of Americans who really didn't want to do this, but finally, in the end, felt it was what had to be done for the sake of their dignity as free and independent people, that they had to separate.
But it was not something everybody wanted to do right off the bat.
And there were some of the patriots like John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, who would not sign the Declaration of Independence, even though he was just as angry as everybody else was because he feared what's going to happen if we are an independent?
Will we be able to kind of handle things?
Will we be able to raise an army?
Will we be, you know, we've taken for granted certain things that come with being part of the empire.
So it took a lot of guts for people, you know, these smart guys who knew what they were getting into to pledge their, you know, their sacred honor to this audacious act of separation.
But I think it was a desire to have liberty, to be free, to not have an essentially foreign power, which is what the British had become to them.
They had come to think of themselves as American.
That's an interesting thing.
So this process between 1763 and 1776 or so, we became Americans.
We stopped being English colonists living in America and in our own minds.
The hearts and minds, John Adams said, were changed.
And he says that was the real American Revolution, this coming to think of ourselves as Americans and not just the extension of England.
So, Dr. McClay, there's a lot of people that debate what our birthday is as a nation.
And I always find it interesting that we consider our birthday to be the day that we signed a separation document, not the day we won the war, not the day that we ratified the Constitution in 1787 or that we had the Bill of Rights become the law of the land in 1791.
Why is it important?
And what is the argument to say that our birthday was the day that we signed this document in July of 1776?
Well, and you know, it could be also July 2nd, because that was the day that we actually passed the resolution.
That's true.
But July 4th was the day that the document, the Declaration, was ratified and was promulgated.
I think, you know, I think that it's actually the other things are not, I think I wouldn't have any trouble dismissing those arguments, but the second versus the fourth, that's an interesting call.
You know, part of what Jefferson was doing and what the founders were doing with the Declaration, they were declaring, it was, as I like to say sometimes to my students, this was a press release to the world.
Here's what we're doing, folks.
And this is why we're doing.
And so you get the long train of abuses spelled out in rather vivid prose.
Nobody, a lot of people don't read it.
Not even say nobody, but a lot of people don't read it.
We read the preamble.
We read the famous words of Jefferson about our being created equal and so on.
But it really is an effort to say to the world, here we are.
This is what we're doing.
This is why we're doing it.
And there's a grandeur about that statement.
It's not just a sort of like a divorce decree.
It's not against something.
It's for something.
We've come of age.
At the beginning, it talks about in the course of human events that there comes a time when one people should separate from another people.
And there's almost, we've really matured.
It's really almost a child that's matured beyond the parent.
It's time to be on its own.
So I think it's this sense, even at the outset, that we were doing something that was more important than just our own welfare that makes the 4th of July the right day.
Because in fact, we now know that we were.
We were doing something that was dramatically transformative in the history of the world.
There had never been anything like the nation that came out of the American Revolution.
Never been a republic of that size come forward and commit itself to the principles of self-rule, of republic and self-rule.
So it was momentous.
And the Declaration of Rights in the Declaration of Independence, that didn't have to be there, but it was.
And I think that's, again, part of the grandeur of the document.
It seized the moment and made something much bigger out of it.
So I favor the fourth.
Now, can I comment on one thing here, Chris?
You mentioned the Constitution.
Honoring Constitution Day 00:04:28
I've always felt the Constitution gets short-changed in our national.
We do have Constitution Day, but most people can't tell you when it is.
They know when the 4th of July is because it's.
It's the 4th of July.
But September 17th.
And there have been efforts to kind of canonize that date.
And I hope some of these are beginning to bear fruit.
But it doesn't have the pizzazz that the 4th of July have.
I wish people did accord it more respect because it seems to me, you know, there are many nations on this planet who have an independence day.
There are not many, there are not any.
There are not any that can celebrate having a constitution that's lasted for over 230 years.
And is, God willing, still going strong.
I don't know.
It's constantly being battered.
And that's an element of our history is that the Constitution has been challenged every day of the week.
And so this is not new.
I think we have some real obstacles to a restoration of the Constitution as originally understood.
But at least it's there.
And at least we have it as a president to look to.
So I believe we should celebrate it more.
I'm all for a much more high-octane Constitution Day than what we have now.
So maybe we have both.
And also December of 1791, when the Bill of Rights got ratified as well, that's pretty significant as well.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
It is.
It is.
And for a lot of people, the Bill of Rights, when they say the Constitution, they're actually talking about the Bill of Rights.
They're not really talking about the separation.
They should be, but they aren't.
It's the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, depending on who you're talking to.
And thank God for those things.
That's for George Mason, who pushed forward.
Yes, yes.
And, you know, Madison, James Madison, who was generally considered the architect of the Constitution, he didn't really want a Bill of Rights.
And there was a good argument that if you start enumerating some rights, what about the ones you didn't mention?
Does that mean those aren't rights?
That's the ninth amendment.
So there you go.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so that's the ninth and tenth amendments are there, you know, and God knows maybe someday we'll give them the respect they're due.
But yeah, it's it's it's thank goodness, thank George Mason, thanks thanks to thank the anti-federalists, because they were the ones who really pushed for that.
One of the lessons of that history is that in a lot of conflicts in this country, you don't have winner takes all.
The winner has to give something to the loser.
And sometimes with the part that the loser gives ends up being the best part.
So that's something to really in this polarized time.
And, you know, I'm feeling pretty polarized myself a lot of the time, but it's important to remember that, that we've had, you know, contrary to what the president said the other day, we have had, we've had worse times than now.
We had the Civil War, for example, and we've had worse times even since the Civil War.
But we have in our souls a kind of genius for political accommodation that the Constitution is really the embodiment of.
And so I think the protection of the Constitution is for me one of the most important tasks they had.
And it's really something that, Charlie, I mean, I think you and your organization are fighting that fight.
It's, you know, it's, it shouldn't be a cause just for one side of the aisle.
The moment it seems to be.
History as a Larger Vision 00:06:00
And so be it.
It's the Constitution, you know, and we have to have it.
We have to keep it.
Amen.
So the last question I want to ask you, it might be a little unusual, but it's about history and how we view history.
I know we talked about this earlier, but it seems as if this idea of German historicism, of looking at history as a constant unfolding towards an inevitable utopia or perfection, kind of dominates the way we teach history.
How aware were you when you developed this that those kind of influences are there?
Can you help me?
I'm just personally curious.
Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah.
Look, just think of the saying that President Obama liked to use.
I'm not sure exactly where it comes from.
It's actually an adaptation of a sort of biblical archo-history.
The archohistory towards justice, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, that whole formulation is faulty.
You know, it, it, it, you know, this is a really good question because, you know, especially in a country that's formed by the Bible, by Christianity and Judaism, which are phase in which history does have a meaning.
It's not just, as Henry Ford said, one damn thing after another.
It does go somewhere.
We don't necessarily know, except in the broadest outlines, where it's going according to that formula.
But then you have, you know, people come along like Hegel, and of course, Marx is sort of an inversion of Hegel, who thought, oh, you could plot the whole thing out, the whole dialectical process of history, how it arrives at the sort of absolute mind at the end of the rainbow.
And this whole sort of secular messianism that Marxism is a great example of, although it's not the only one.
This is, I think, the wrong way to think about history.
I think that history is often the larger vision of where history is going is, I think, not really available to us.
I think we see it through a glass darkly, if I may borrow a phrase from Paul.
And what we can do is work with what we have, what's in front of us, and try to, just as, you know,
the person who formulates theories about relieving world poverty is doing much less good than somebody who picks up somebody who's fallen on the sidewalk and just helps them and helps them over to get bandaged and cleaned up.
You know, that's there's an intoxicating quality to big historical pictures that takes people off of the track of the responsibility they have at the here and now to live good lives as virtuous people.
So I also think that a lot of his theories of history, Obama's bending towards justice is a positive view, but there's a lot of them that are very negative.
The decline of the West and that kind of thing.
And I think, again, in our religious heritage, one of the things about Christianity, especially, I think Judaism too, is despair is a sin.
We are not permitted to despair because to despair is to assume we know where events are going and that we live under either no God or a cruel God who is taking us there.
Despair presumes the things we cannot know.
What we can know are about the goods that are right in front of us to pursue.
So, but one of the great things about our history is we have such a goodly heritage.
We can look back in hard times.
We can look back at what the founders did, what Lincoln was able to do during the Civil War.
At D-Day, you know, our history is just studded with these moments of resplendent triumph.
And that history is still going.
The challenges before us now are, I think, less imposing than ones that would have stopped people's hearts in the past, and yet they kept going.
So that's one of the, I think, one of the values of history, properly studied, properly taught, properly appropriated, properly.
You know, it's one of the things about Harry Truman that I've always liked is that he, Harry Truman never went, well, he really didn't, he did not have a college education, basically had a high school education, but he read history and he learned from it.
And not just modern history, he read Tacitus.
He was a big fan of Roman history and he knew it backwards and forwards.
And it was one of the ways, things that he drew on in the unprecedented situation that faced him at the end of the Second World War, the Cold War, how to arrange things.
He may not have done everything right, but he did a lot right.
And I think to the extent he did, it was because he had this historical sense.
I don't think we have leaders, I don't think we've had leaders in a long time who had that historical sense.
And we'd be better off if they did.
We'd be more optimistic if we did.
Yes, and would be better leaders.
I was just curious about that personally.
Better Leaders with Historical Sense 00:03:33
Charlie for Hillsdale, Charlie F-O-R-Hillsdale.com.
And this is going to be, this is part one of a multi-part series as we're going through The Land of Hope, the Great American Story.
And if you go to charlieforhillsdale.com, you'll be able to register for this course for free and go through it with us.
And you can send your feedback as always through email, freedom at charliekirk.com.
If you guys like to touch things and read through things, then you are able to then order the Land of Hope textbook for all of your kids.
So if you're a parent right now and you have kids that are just being propagandized by nonsense at whatever school, and we get those emails all the time, Dr. McClay, buy that textbook and use that as a helping tool, as maybe a second voice, right?
Dr. McClay, talk just briefly about that.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, I'm so thank you for the opportunity to do that.
As yeah, it is, I think, a very unusual textbook.
It's really designed, excuse me, designed to be read.
I don't have a lot of jazzy graphics and tables and sidebars.
And It is meant to be a story and to have the qualities of a story.
And most of the readers and reviewers have said that, have credited that.
So I think I did it.
The thing I want, especially happy to have you give me this opportunity to mention, is that I just finished a young reader's edition of Land of Hope.
And it won't be out until January, but and we still have a lot of work to do on the illustrations and all that.
But it's really designed for younger readers.
I kind of tried to pitch it to fifth, sixth grade, because a lot of states, that's when kids take their first American history course.
It's very similar to Land of Hope.
You know, we call it Land of Hope Jr. around the publishing house.
But it's much more accessible for younger people.
It'll be in two volumes.
I hope we have a little box and it will have a lot more illustrations and be more kid-friendly.
But with the same content within limits, you know, I can't, there's a lot of economic things you can't explain to fifth graders.
So I've had to kind of tone that down a little bit.
But those of you who have young kids and think that Land of Hope is just above their reading level, first, give it a try anyway.
You might be surprised.
And secondly, you know, help is on the way with the Young Readers Edition.
I also have for homeschoolers, and a lot of people using Land of Hope or homeschoolers, we have a teacher's guide and a student workbook available to supplement it.
So you got everything you need to teach the book at home with your children.
Phenomenal.
And also the videos that you guys have done from The Great American Story are good starting points.
If you guys are living really busy lives, you want to go through them.
And what I love about the way Hillsdale does it is there's tests afterwards so you can really test your comprehension of it.
So Dr. McClay, can't wait to our next one.
We're going to be talking about the genius of the Constitution in the next one.
I did the best I could not to get to the Constitution.
We got right up to it.
And I got a lot I want to talk to you about at the next episode.
So thank you, Dr. McClay.
Can't wait and we deeply appreciate it.
Teaching at Home with Tests 00:00:28
Thank you.
What a pleasure.
Thank you.
And thanks to all of you.
You bet.
Talk to you soon.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
If you'd like to support our program, please do so at charliekirk.com/slash support.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
God bless.
Speak to you soon.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.
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