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Sept. 28, 2022 - The Charlie Kirk Show
32:44
3 Professors LIVE from Hillsdale College—Khalil Habib, Kenneth Calvert, and Kevin Slack
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Roman Republic Parallels 00:01:58
Hey, everybody.
Today, the Charlie Kirk Show, a full Hillsdale hour as I do the show live from Hillsdale College.
Does the Roman Republic and America have any parallels?
What can we learn from Montesquieu and Locke?
And what are the big takeaways of post-60s liberalism?
Email me your thoughts as always.
Freedom at charliekirk.com.
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So we're here at Hillsdale College.
I thought it'd be fun to kind of get a series of experts from Hillsdale College so you could get an idea of why am I always bragging on Hillsdale College?
Locke's Natural Law 00:11:01
Well, just a couple of awesome people.
We have Dr. Khalil Habib.
We did a whole series with him.
I want to get back to that.
I missed that.
And so we're working on getting that back.
He's really special.
We had him on to talk about Nietzsche and many other things.
And it's Dr. Habib who joins us right now.
Dr. Habib, welcome back to the program.
Charlie, it's good to see you.
Long time.
Yes, it has been long, and we have to do it more often.
So I understand you're teaching a course on Montesquieu, Locke, and many other things.
So my Montesquieu is, let's just say, not as sharp as it should be.
At least I did remember he wrote a book called Spirit of the Laws when Kyle mentioned it.
Why is it important for us to know Montesquieu or understand Montesquieu to properly understand the American founding and tell us who Montesquieu is?
So Montesquieu was an aristocrat from France and he had published The Spirit of the Laws in around 1750.
And many of our early founders had actually read it in French and it was quickly translated into English.
And he's one of the second or third most quoted authority among the early American founders when it came to debating what exactly is the purpose and role of government.
Now, to be sure, Locke is central to that debate where the founders take Locke's understanding of natural rights very seriously and Locke's idea that consent of the governed is the only legitimate form of government.
But where Montesquieu comes in is Locke has a very early version of the separation of powers.
So he separates the executive and the legislative branch.
And it's a bit of a mystery where he puts the judicial branch.
It's somewhat shared by the executive and the legislative.
For Locke, with respect to domestic issues, the legislative branch does have some control over the judiciary.
Whereas when it comes to international relations, the executive.
Now, when Montesquieu writes The Spirit of the Laws, he's very reluctant to go down that path.
What he wants is a far stricter, if that's a word, separation.
And so he identifies three powers that any government has, whether it's a tyranny or whether it's a republic, there's three powers.
The question is: how are they organized and assembled?
Who has control over them?
The executive, the legislative, and the judicial.
Well, in a tyranny, as you can imagine, the authority is centralized, and the despot would simply wield all three.
And for Locke, it's okay to have the separation just between the legislative branch and the executive, because the executive branch is checked by the legislative branch.
And of course, the legislative branch is checked by the consent of the governed.
And they're all working from within a very strict standard of natural right that Locke puts forward.
But with Montesquieu, Montesquieu does not believe you can have political liberty in any government unless all three powers are separated.
But even if they are separated, anytime a power begins to abuse its authority, you no longer have what he calls liberty.
So if you look at our Constitution, the framers basically separate all three and then go over each aspect of it.
And so you've got the executive branch, you've got writings on what the powers of the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary are.
That's Montesquieu's doing.
So he's enormously important for that reason alone.
Now, you could consider him a bit of an honorary founder in a way that we would consider Locke.
But the course is not exclusively devoted to Montesquieu.
It's our flagship U.S. Constitution course.
And we have some liberty to add some material that's not usually included in our text.
And so what we've been doing is taking very seriously Jefferson's letter to Henry Lee, where he's informing him what went into the writing of the Declaration of Independence.
And Jefferson says, well, I'm drawing from principles as old as Aristotle and Locke and Sydney.
And so that gives us a bit of a framework or an outline of how to proceed to understand how the framers understood themselves.
So we just finished a whole section on Aristotle's politics and the ethics.
And then we turned to Locke, where we covered virtually the entire second treatise.
And now we're just about to wrap up book 11 in Spirit of the Laws, where Montesquieu discusses liberty.
And then after that, we will turn to the Federalist Papers.
And in the Federalist Papers, there's only one philosopher actually mentioned by name.
It's not Locke, but it's Montesquieu.
And it's Montesquieu in relation to how one deals with expanding the orbit of the governmental powers so that you can control factions and bring about some kind of equilibrium within the branches of government so that it can foster tranquility and liberty without having to squash, say, factions militarily, because then you'd be a despotism.
So a bit of a combination of David Hume and Montesquieu go into the early Federalist papers.
And so I'm just trying to sort of make good on Jefferson's letter and show students how our founding is really a result of absolute genius and but a real deep understanding of history political thought.
Yeah, I think it's Federalist 47 where they mentioned Montesquieu a couple of times.
And so Dr. Habib, I think it's really important as we try to educate the audience, and I get educated when I just listen to you, about how we view power.
This is something I've been really fascinated with and kind of how different structures of government understand power and who actually has the power.
Where did the idea of the people being sovereign come from?
Was that Lockean in nature?
How did that idea?
Yeah, without question, that's law of God.
But Locke makes that very emphatic.
To some extent, you see it already indicated in works like Aristotle, but it's not as pronounced.
He's more interested in the moral quality of the rulers.
But you can see that whether it's classical or early modern political thought, there's always a sense that consent is required of governing.
Otherwise, it's coercion and you don't have anything even resembling liberty.
But it's Locke who begins to use terms such as the sovereignty of the people.
And because he builds it on the consent of the individual who does have a duty to respect and honor the rights of others, so it's not strictly individualistic in an extreme sense.
It's rather that a commonwealth that takes seriously liberty and property rights, among other things, has to acknowledge the central authority of the individual.
We need each other's consent because in the state of nature, we're all free and equal from any authority of any other person.
There is no coercion that is legitimate within the state of nature for Locke.
And so that really forms the foundation for the consent of the governed and the sovereignty of the people in Locke.
This is very important because, you know, we look at the American founding sometimes and we look at it in a silo or we fence it off.
But it's important to understand the people that they studied, the ideas that they pondered, right?
That Jefferson and Madison, well, Jefferson, obviously the author of the Declaration, Madison, Jay and Hamilton, much more of the driving force behind the Constitution.
And that's really what Hillsdale College does better than any other institution on the planet.
So, Dr. Habib, I want to ask about social contract theory and why Locke was different.
I'm going to try to tie this to current events very quickly.
People talk all the time: I have a right to this, I have a right to that.
I have a right to housing, I have a right to healthcare, I have a right to be happy, I have a right to an iPhone, I have a right to TikTok, I have a right to all this.
But Locke's view was different.
Locke's view was that rights were given by a creator or from God, this idea of natural rights.
Why is it important that we understand natural rights before we even begin to hear the complaints of somebody saying, I have a right to all these different material things?
Yeah, that's good.
I mean, for Locke, he distinguishes liberty from license early on when he first introduces the notion of rights.
The idea that a right is anything you want to do would be too permissive for Locke.
He even associates that with license.
For him, liberty is working within what he calls the law of nature.
And that law of nature is known through reason and it's given to us by God and by nature.
And so it's really a right to self-govern.
And that when one, on the one hand, means a form of government, you want a government in which the citizens get to self-govern or at least represent it fairly, but it also means to self-govern your appetites.
So if you define a right as just the indulging of one's license, Locke would not consider that a form of liberty.
For liberty for him means self-rule, and moral virtue is the command of reason over the appetites.
If you can't self-govern your with respect to your appetites, then it's highly unlikely that you can be self-governing in a form of government.
So before he moves us in the direction of forming a civil state that will protect the rights that we have, he has to first explain what a free human being is.
And a free human being is not one that just indulges in any license that they have.
He's very explicit about that.
That's so fascinating.
And so then, Dr. Habib, why is it important then when someone says, I have a right to all these different sorts of things?
Mean, meaning I have a right to receive somebody else's property.
What would Locke, how would Locke view that?
Yeah, Locke is very clear about that.
Property belongs to the person who earned it.
And in fact, in the passage on private property, he says the property, private property, belongs to the rational and the industrious.
And the Federalists actually argued early on in the Federalist Papers that the purpose of our government was to protect even the inequalities that will emerge from the disparate amount of wealth people can collect for themselves on the basis of certain priorities that they've made in life and choices and different talents.
So for Locke, property rights means protecting the fruit of your labor.
What we often hear today, cloaked in the language of rights, is a sense of entitlement.
And for Locke, that would be a violation of private property and natural right.
That's so right.
And it's easy to act as if you have a moral right to tempting to somebody else's property or somebody else's consciousness, but it violates public opinion.
Exactly.
Discipline and Duty in Rome 00:09:45
Well, we're out of time, Dr. Habib.
Great as always.
Thank you.
Enjoy your class.
And see you around campus here at Hillsdale College.
Appreciate it.
Enjoy your visit.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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So there's, I haven't had a chance to take it yet.
I've taken a majority of the Hillsdale online courses.
I have not taken the one on Roman history yet.
There's just a really great one that is being taught by Professor Kenneth Calvert.
Did a great job, and people are really raving about it.
Professor of History here at Hillsdale College.
Professor, welcome.
How are you?
I'm very well.
Thank you.
Great to be with you.
Thank you.
So I'm meaning to take your course, and the reviews are just phenomenal about it.
I want to ask you specifically about Roman history.
There's a parallel that is made every so often about the decline of Rome, you know, porous borders, a destroyed currency, greedy politicians, some would say sexual perversion, and kind of comparing that to America.
Do you think those parallels are helpful or appropriate as we kind of try to look to see if a superpower has ever been on the course of what America is on right now?
Yeah, I think there are some definite parallels, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that we are a free society, and particularly in the Roman Republic.
I mean, that was a free society as well.
And whenever you have a free society, you have the freedom of citizens to be what they will.
And as a Christian, of course, I understand that at least part of that is to act out on their fallenness.
But there's also positive that can be found in that.
Now, the Roman Empire, I think, suffered from a number of things.
First of all, its paganism was very much running against it.
The second was the fact that it was magnificently successful.
And so they had a huge amount of wealth and a huge amount of luxury.
And you put all those things together and you do have a recipe for disaster.
You find in so many of the ancient cultures that they begin to fall.
Their demise begins as soon as they reach their height.
Now, can we make some parallels with the United States on that?
You know, we had a great century where we defeated the Nazis, who were socialists, I think we need to remember, and defeated all those fascist forces and then came home and created the most remarkable economy the world has ever seen and spread freedom, spread great medicine, spread technology all over the world, which has created the world we have today.
So much of CRT and what's going on in the left, they want to pretend like all that has happened in the last 100, 200 years has been negative, but I don't think so, of course.
I think there's been a great deal of positive to it.
Has there been negative?
Of course, we're human beings.
But I think it's been mostly positive.
Finally, I'll say this.
I don't think the parallel works for one main reason.
We have this great document that states that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among them being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The Romans would never have written that kind of document.
The idea of equality there would never have happened.
Also, the Romans fought three wars to keep their slaves in place.
We fought a war to free the slaves.
And so I'm a person who sees a lot of the parallels, yes, because we're human beings and because we live in a free society and because we're a huge society and very, very wealthy, there are a lot of parallels.
But I'm one who would say that we're nowhere near over.
And I think a lot of the blowback to the Biden administration, a lot of what's going on today, the blowback to the left that is on the part of sane Americans, I think that's showing us that there's still a lot of life left.
That is the best answer I've ever heard, where you say, look, there might be parallels superficially or kind of looking at the top, but the Romans never would have composed the document that would say, one of the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that have tied them to another.
They never would have wrote that.
That's very smart.
And so let me ask you, you know, kind of just looking at the arc of Roman history, and this is obviously a very, you know, let's just say open question.
When you look at the good emperors, the bad emperors, you know, whether good being Aurelius and, you know, that whole category and negative Caligula, Nero, and many others, you know, what are the, let's talk to positives.
What are some of the virtues that we can learn of a statesman in a time of today?
Because you have multiple examples over a long period of time.
And in historical terms, from what I understand, rather well-documented history of how they acted and what they did.
What are some of the lessons you think we can learn from and apply them to today's time?
Well, when we look at the Roman Empire before it became Christian under Constantine, we can see a number of good emperors that really exemplify the positive nature of what Rome was.
Caesar Augustus was a very rational man and was a man who did an excellent job of organizing an empire that was far abroad across many cultures, across many languages.
And he did a great job of unifying a very diverse empire.
If we look at Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius, and I would encourage any listener to read Marcus Aurelius on the meditations, his meditations.
Here's a guy who understood discipline and duty.
And against his own personal interests, he wanted to be a philosopher.
He wanted to do anything other than be emperor.
And his example of faithfully, dutifully doing his best for the empire is really a tremendous example.
And I would say that his stoicism and his meditations had a definite influence on our founders, particularly a man like George Washington, who returned power back to the government, back to the civil authorities over and over again.
He was a man who understood that this was not about him.
It was about ideals.
It was about the highest good.
That is so well said.
Yeah, it is impossible to properly understand the American founding without having some understanding of Roman history.
I mean, George Washington, I think he was a member of the Order of Cincinnatus, right?
Which was a very similar type of story of what he actually ended up living.
And his story was that he served in the war and went back to his farm or something.
Right, right.
Cincinnati.
He won the war and then went back.
Right.
Cincinnatus was elected dictator.
And in ancient Rome, that was an elected office in a time of great danger.
He was given six months' total power.
Cincinnatus went out.
He did his duty, defeated the enemy, marched back to Rome all in two weeks, and gave his power up and went back to his farm.
And that's one reason why Washington is so famous: all he wanted to do was go back to Mount Vernon.
And he ended up, he was part of the Order of Cincinnatus, or Professor Calvert.
I was mine together.
Okay.
Yeah.
The Order of Cincinnatus was actually named after him.
He was the American Cincinnatus, and the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, really is named after George Washington and for his willingness to give up power.
Yeah, it's spectacular.
Professor Calvert, thank you so much.
Everyone, check out his course.
I know I will be at charlie4hillsdale.com.
Thank you so much, Professor.
The War on the American Republic 00:09:57
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Hillsdale College has an all-star team of professors and thinkers.
It's really impressive.
And we have another one joining us right now.
He is the Associate Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College.
And he has a very interesting take on post-60s liberalism and radicalism.
And I look forward to going into that.
Before I go into it, though, you guys can always email us freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
That's freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
And joining us now is Professor Slack from Hillsdale College.
How are you doing?
Welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Hey, Charlie, how are you?
I'm doing very well.
So the great Kyle Mernan, who is the driving force behind all things online courses here at Hillsdale College, said that you have a very interesting take on liberalism post-1960s.
And so I'll let you take it from there.
Well, I'm doing a course for Hillsdale College on post-60s liberalism.
And one of the things, the things that I think is important is that people, when they use the words liberal or radical or progressive, neoliberal, that they root that in some historical context.
And so one of the things that I do in the course is while I treat some of the later movements, identity politics, transgenderism, the anti-racist movement, and so on, is I go back in history and I show how the radicals that embrace all those ideas are really breaking from the mid-century liberals.
And that's in the 1960s.
In fact, many of the things that we talk about today, even words like woke or trigger, all those things are around in the late 60s and in the early 70s and are even being sponsored by the federal government.
So in this course, we look at what the regime is today.
But importantly, we understand that by seeing how we got where we are.
So I think that's really important for people to kind of draw the roots back to 1960s and how all these forces came together.
Can you talk about how some of the, you could call them liberal forces, you know, let's just say classical liberal forces that would say that want international trade, that want, let's just say, open and porous borders and maybe more socially liberal on certain social issues, about how they kind of created a consensus of neoliberalism for many decades.
And recently that's really been pushed back against.
But what we're talking about post-1960s is all these different types of variations of what could be considered, you know, liberalism or radicalism.
How do we reconcile, you know, what would be considered neoliberalism with some of the more radical elements that we now see driving the American discourse that would call themselves more kind of like leftists?
Well, I think if you look at the mid-century liberals, here we're talking about the New Deal era, 1933 to 1945, that liberalism for them meant big government.
It was the creation of the welfare state.
But ultimately, in the 1960s, you see an implosion, right, the end of the 60s, the American economy, and the stagflation that rolls in in the 1970s.
The break with those mid-century liberals who prioritized the labor coalition, right, where the government was supporting labor unions, something like 35% of the workforce was unionized around 1950.
After the 1960s, what you find is a class break.
And so the tensions that occur in the neoliberal period, I think you can understand in terms of class.
You have on the left, the radicals who create systems of identity politics, and they ensconce themselves in the universities as well as in the regulatory commissions and agencies.
We're familiar with them.
The same radicals that were there in the 70s were still there in the 1990s.
And they understood the American middle class as being the enemy, right?
It was culpable of racism, for example.
But then you also find another elite group, and I think that's the group that is part of what's called the knowledge economy in the 1970s and after, sometimes called libertarians.
But that group saw the middle class also as being an enemy.
And while those on the left were going to fight for the underprivileged or the disadvantaged, by which they meant government policies for minorities and single women, the whole affirmative action regime, that you find on the right, they're making neoliberal arguments to benefit the disadvantaged, by which they mean the consumer.
And so what you lose is any element of citizenship.
And so Americans become replaceable consumers.
Both of those groups on the right and the left in this neoliberal period see the middle class as the enemy.
I should also point out one more thing: that neoliberal is a word that's being used in the 1980s to describe the new Democrats, right?
Think about Tim Wirth, Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, Paul Tsangas.
These are all Democrats who are saying what we need is more free market policies, deregulation.
And this would be a solution to the big fiscal policies of the liberals of the mid-century.
So, Dr. Slack, I find that fascinating.
And, you know, in the time we have remaining here, I do want to ask you about one of the courses you teach.
And I think I'm understanding this.
You've taught it before.
Politics 804 on Herbert Marcuse, which, of course, reminds me of one-dimensional man.
Who is Marcuse, and why is it important that we learn about him and what kind of damage has he done to our republic?
Well, Marcuse is one of the founders of critical theory.
And critical theory is a power philosophy that's responding to the positivist philosophies in the mid-century.
When you hear the language of other, for example, that comes from the Frankfurt School, where it's important to understand certain identities and how they're inseparable from their other and how that very relationship leads to political oppression.
And so Marcuse was arguing for a new politics of liberation.
So I get into this in great detail in the online course.
I'm not sure how much we can get into it now.
But essentially, Marcuse has the argument that the philosophers or you could say the poets, and here you could stand in place of that, the white young progressive radicals should ally with, in solidarity, should ally with the underprivileged of society against the American middle class.
And so you have this rejection of what was seen as the middle class, the working class, in the 60s by the radicals themselves.
How this unfolds in the neoliberal period is that those who are espousing critical theory, who see America as a land of oppression as the enemy, they form their own authoritative priesthood.
And when we round out the neoliberal era around 2008, what we find is, particularly on the conservative side, that all the conservative gods are dead.
The old neoconservative school, the libertarian school, the performance traditionalism, they no longer are able to justify the oligarchy that's been created.
For example, the change in antitrust law that's privileged large corporations and the formation of monopolies in every sector of the American economy.
And facing this crisis of legitimacy, both the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the 2008 housing market crisis, I think the oligarchs needed legitimacy.
And so they sided with that woke priesthood, whose roots go back to critical theory.
That was the foundation for other schools we're familiar with.
Critical legal studies, critical race theory, transgenderism, and identity politics.
And so you have an oligarchy that rejects the populist movement on the right, and it turns to the group that had been most critical of it.
And that's going to be the radicals on the left to justify, to give that regime legitimacy.
And so there are two real religions that have emerged.
One we saw during the COVID crisis, and that's the religion of health.
So we have authorities on health who, by poisoning the population, will do them good through government mandates.
And then you also have anti-racism.
And anti-racism has really taken over many of those institutions we would thought were conservative, particularly Christian churches.
That is so fascinating.
I wish we had more time.
Dr. Slack, we have to have you back again.
And you guys could check out all things Hillsdale at CharlieForhillsdale.com.
Thank you so much, Dr. Charlie Slack.
Can I get a plug for a book real quick?
It's called War on the American Republic.
That's my book that's coming.
Do you want to have more time?
I have a book that's called War on the American Republic with Encounter Press, and that'll be coming out this winter.
And it covers all the things we've been talking about.
So when that comes out, come do a full hour on our program.
I mean that.
If you're ever in Phoenix, come by the office.
We'll have you.
Please check out it.
Check it out.
Thank you so much, Dr. Slack.
Great, Charlie.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always.
Freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thank you so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.
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